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4 


























THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY 


A COURSE OF LECTURES 


BY 

JOHN W. CHADWICK 

MINISTER OF THE SECOND UNITARIAN CHURCH IN BROOKLYN, N. Y. 


Out from the heart of nature rolled 

The bit*/ dens of the Bible old. 

> 

> > 5 j 

j > 

-> 3 ) 


NEW YORK & LONDON 

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 

|inicktrbocktr 

1887 


J3S^7S 

. C.37 


Copyright by 
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 
^1878 

i • 3 • S f 

Engineers School Liby. 

June 29,1931 



Press of 

G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
N ew York 


TO 


MY PEOPLE 

1864-1 878 











































PREFACE 


The lectures contained in this volume were writ 
ten during the winter of 1877-78, for my own peo- 
■ pie, some of whom came to hear them with some 
others. I publish them at the request of various 
persons who listened to them, and who desire to 
impress them more distinctly on their memories; 
also with the hope of propagating their ideas some- 
what beyond the circle of my original audience. 
Prepared and written as they were in the course of 
a single season, and in connection with many other 
tasks, they do not of course pretend to any virtue 
of original research or exhaustive presentation. 
My object is to condense into a single volume, 
modest in size and cost, the principal results of the 
best historical and scientific criticism of the separate 
books of the Bible, and of their mutual relations. 
I am not aware of any other volume which has 
made exactly this attempt, and it is high time that 
somebody should make it. The truth of these re- 
sults, if truth it be, is scattered up and down 


) 


VI 


PREFACE. 


through scores of volumes which few public libra- 
ries, even in our great cities, have upon their 
shelves, and which it would cost the individual 
reader hundreds of dollars to procure. Neverthe- 
less I shall be disappointed if one effect of these 
lectures of mine is not to impel the reader to pro- 
cure for himself some of the books which I have 
found most helpful and inspiring. Much, however, 
that has been written is not only costly and inac- 
cessible, but is so laboriously and minutely critical 
in its form as to repel the average reader. I dare 
not hope that my own treatment will be entertain- 
ing, but for busy men and women I trust it will 
have some advantage over that of the great Biblical 
scholars, in that it is at once compact and compre- 
hensive. 

The results of my investigations will doubtless 
be astonishing, if not offensive, to any person of 
conventional opinions who may happen to stumble 
upon them in the dark. But those who have kept 
abreast of modern critical studies (their name is 
legion in the most orthodox circles) must be aware 
that these results are, almost without exception, 
those which have been reached by many scholars 
of unimpeachable orthodoxy. In the department 
of Old Testament criticism, it is very seldom that 
I exceed the limits of my venerated teacher, Dr. 
Geo. R. Noyes, of Harvard University, and those 


PREFACE. 


VII 


within which Dean Stanley finds himself secure of 
his ecclesiastical position. The most advanced and 
revolutionary opinion which I maintain is that of 
Dr. Abram Kuenen, in regard to the formation of 
the Pentateuch. But for maintaining substantially 
this opinion in the Encyclopedia Britannic a, Prof. 
Robertson Smith, of Aberdeen, could not be con- 
victed of heresy by his local presbyt'ery. A remark- 
able sign of the times. 

Gladly do I confess the powerful influence of 
Kuenen on my Old Testament studies. But I have 
not followed him blindly. I have diligently com- 
pared him with others, Ewald especially, only to be 
more thoroughly convinced of his superior penetra- 
tion. My studies of the New Testament have been 
less dominated by any one authority. Recognizing 
the incomparable genius of Baur, I have hesitated 
to go with him in his refusal to grant Paul more 
than four Epistles. Perhaps Zeller’s treatment of 
the Acts found me a readier convert, because of its 
striking vindication of the Apostle of my boundless 
reverence and love. And I trust that my opinions 
upon many points in both Testaments have been 
profoundly influenced by the immense sobriety of 
Dr. Samuel Davidson, whose elaborate introduc- 
tions are a double monument of his colossal in- 
dustry and his heroic independence. 

1 append a list of some of the more valuable 


VIII 


PREFACE. 


books which I have made use of in the preparation 
of these lectures : — 

Old Testament and Apocrypha : — Davidson’s 
Introduction to the Old Testament and Apocrypha; 
Ewald’s History of Israel, Kuenen’s Religion of 
Israel ; Kuenen’s Prophets and Prophecy in Israel ; 
Kuenen’s (pamphlet) The Five Books of Moses; 
Nicolas’ Des Doctrines Religeuses des Juifs; Stan- 
ley’s History of the Jewish Church; F. W. New- 
man’s Hebrew Monarchy; J. H. Allen’s Hebrew 
Men and Times ; Colenso on the Pentateuch ; Gold- 
ziher’s Plebrew Mythology ; Tide’s Outlines of the 
History of Religion; The Bible for Young People, 
Edited by Oort, Hooykaas and Kuenen ; Knappert’s 
Religion of Israel ; Matthew Arnold’s Literature and 
Dogma, God and the Bible, Prophecy of the Great 
Restoration; Noyes’ Introductions to his transla- 
tions of the Prophets, Psalms, Proverbs, Canticles, 
Ecclesiastes, Book of Job; Reville’s Song of Solo- 
mon ; Davidson’s Canon of the Bible; Smith’s (Prof. 
W. Robertson) Article, “The Bible” in Ninth Edi- 
tion of Encyclopaedia Britannica; Milman’s History 
ol the Jews. 

New Testament : — De Wette’s Introduction to 
the New Testament ; Davidson’s Introduction to the 
New Testament; Westcott’s Introduction to the 
Study of the New Testament ; Matthew Arnold’s 
God and the Bible, and St. Paul and Protestantism ; 


PREFACE. 


IX 


Rev. J. J. Tayler, The Fourth Gospel; Rev. E. H. 
Sears The Fourth Gospel the Heart of Christ; 
Renan’s Life of Jesus, St. Paul, The Apostles; Sir 
R. D. Hanson's Jesus of History; Anonymous 
Supernatural Religion, Keim’s Jesus of Nazara; 
Schenkel’s Life of Jesus; Strauss’ Life of Jesus; 
Strauss’ New Life of Jesus ; Dean Stanley’s Epistles 
to the Corinthians ; Jowett’s Epistles to the Romans 
and Thessalonians ; F. C Baur’s Paul, His Life and 
Works; Greg’s Creed of Christendom, Emanuel 
Deutsch’s Literary Remains; Zeller’s Acts of the 
Apostles ; Bleek’s Lectures on the Apocalypse ; Tre- 
gelles’ Origin and Transmission of the Gospels; 
Coquerel’s First Historical Transformations of 
Christianity ; Mackay’s Rise of Christianity and The 
Tubingen School ; Alger’s History of the Doctrine 
of a Future Life; Neander’s Planting and Training 
and Church History; Prof. Fisher’s Beginnings of 
Christianity. 

If my little book shall help even a few hundred 
people to a better knowledge and appreciation of 
the Bible, a deeper but less superstitious reverence 
for its incomparable literature, I shall be satisfied. 
And the sooner it is superseded by some other, 
written with completer knowledge and more con- 
vincing skill, the happier I shall be. 

Chesterfield, Mass., Sept. 5th, 1878. 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS, 


FIRST LECTURE. 

THE OLD TESTAMENT : THE PROPHETS. 

The Bible : Its history and fame, pp. i, 2 — Popular Estimates, 2-5 
— Contents of Bible, 6 — History of Old Testament canon, 7 — The 
Prophets, 10 — The New Criticism, n — Isaiah, 12 — The Deutero- 
Isaiah, 13 — Jeremiah, 14 — Ezekiel, 15 — Daniel, 17 — Minor prophets, 
19 — Hosea, 12 — Yahweh : Why used instead of Jehovah, 20 (note) — 
Joel, 21 — Amos, 22 — Obadiah, 23 — Jonah, 23 — Micah, 24 — Nahum, 
25 — Habbakuk, 25 — Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, 26 — Malachi, 
27 — Chronological order of the Prophets, 27 — Prophetism : popular 
view, 28: — Critical view, 29 — Historical development of prophetism, 
31-34 — Progressive idea of Yahweh, 31 — Elijah and Elisha, 32 — The 
Writing prophets, 33 — Exclusiveness, 35 — Future Life, 36 — Religion 
and Politics, 36 — Asceticism, 36 — Predictions, 37 — Messianic predic- 
tions, 37 — Prophetism and Chi'istianity, 38. 

SECOND LECTURE. 

THE HISTORIES. 

Historical Material in Old Testament, p. 40 — Jewish arrangement 
of the Old Testament books, 41 — Classification of Old Testament 
books, 42 (note) — The Pentateuch : Its Mosaic authorship, 43 — Its 
growth, 44-48 — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and other tribal names and 
legends, 49 — Pentateuch Mythology, 50 — Book of Joshua, 51 — Its 
date and authorship, 52 — Its character, 52— Book of Judges, 53 — Its 
date, 55 — Legends of, 56 — Samson, 56 — Song of Deborah, 57 — 
Book of Ruth, 57 — Its tendency , 58 — Books of Samuel, 58 — Samuel’s 
religion and character, 59 — David’s, 59 — Books of Kings : Their 
prophetic character, 61 — Chronicles : Their priestly character, 62 — 
Ezra and Nehemiah, 65 — Esther a didactic fiction, 66 — History of 
Israel, 67-72 — Religious development, 73 — Monotheism at last, 76 — 
Literary outcome of the Captivity, 77 — Promulgation of the Law , 77 
Further developments, 78. 


XII 


CONTENTS. 


THIRD LECTURE. 

MOSES AND THE PENTATEUCH : THE LAW. 

Meaning of “The Pentateuch,” p. 80 — History of Controversy 
concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch, 81 — Mosaic authorship, 
84-92 — The Ten Commandments, 93 — Oldest Fragments, 96 — Book 
of Covenants, 96 — Prophetic narrators (Yahwehist and older Elohist), 
98 — Their tendency , 101 — Deuteronomy, 103 — Book of Origins, 108 
— Its date, 108 — Priestly character, 109^ — Contents, 109-m — Analogy 
of literature and life with Kuenen’s theory of the late origin of the 
priestly elements in the Pentateuch, 113 — The Semitic genius, 115. 

FOURTH LECTURE. 

THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 

Growth of Old Testament canon, 117 — “ The Writings,” 118— 
The Psalms, rig — Their influence, 120 — Headings and sub-headings, 
121 — Proofs of careless transmission, 122 — Hebrew poetry, 123 — 
Parallelism, T24 — Authors, 124-128 — The Psalms of David, 125 — 
Variety of the Psalms, 130 — Proverbs, 131 — Fragmentary character, 
131 — Not Solomon’s, 132 — Ecclesiastes : A pseudonymous book, 134 
— Its date, 136 — Its character, 137— Immortality, 140 — Song of 
Songs not Solomon’s, 141 — A love-poem, 143 — A noble book, 144 — 
Allegorical interpretations, 145 — Job, 145 — Form and contents, 146 
— Subject, 147 — Age and authorship, 150 — Character of the Old 
Testament, 15 1. 

FIFTH LECTURE. 

THE APOCRYPHA. 

The gap between Old and New Testaments, 153 — From Malachi 
to Jesus, 155 — Aids to filling this gap in Old Testament, 156 — In the 
Apocrypha, 156 — Extra-Biblical, 154 — Canonicity of the Apocrypha, 
157 — Relation to Jewish canon, 157 — Relative value of the contents 
of the Apocrpyha, 158 — Relation to art, 159 — First (or third) book of 
Esdras, : Contents, 160 — Notin Roman Catholic canon, 161 — Second 
(or fourth) Esdras : date, significance, 163 — Tobit : Its supernatural 
and human character, 165 — Judith : the story, 166 — The object, 167 
— The date, 167 — Additions to Esther : purpose of, 168— Wisdom of 
Solomon : Its pseudonmous charaacter, 169 — It? date, 169 — Its re- 
lation to Christianity, 170 — Wisdom of Jesus, the son of Sirach, 01 


CONTENTS. 


XIII 


Ecclesiasticus, 171— Its date, 172— It spirit, 173— Anti-Pharisaic, 174 
—Baruch and Epistle of Jeremy, 175 — Song of Three Holy Children, 
Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, 175 — Prayer of Manasses, 176 — First 
Maccabees, 176 — Judas Maccabseus : his work and spirit, 177 — 
Second Maccabees : Its supernatural character, 179 — Growth of super- 
natural elements, 180 — First contact of Judea and Rome, 181 — Book 
of Enoch : (extra-Biblical) relation to Christianity, 183 — Summing 
up, 185. 

SIXTH LECTURE. 

THE NEW TESTAMENT: PAUL’S EPISTLES. 

Formation of New Testament canon, 187-190 — No Supernatural 
Element involved, 190 — Contents of New Testament, 191 — Epistles 
of Paul, 191 — Classification, 192 — Epistle to the Romans, 193 — 
Date, 193 — Church in Rome, 193 — Purpose of, 194 — Justification by 
faith, 196 — Contents of Romans, 197 — First Epistle to the Corinth- 
ians : When written, 198 — Object, 198 — Paul’s battle, 197 — His 
thorn in the spirit, 198 — Miracles, 201 — Second Corinthians : Con- 
tents, 202 — Character and aim, 202 — The Jerusalem Apostles, 203 — 
Galatians, 204 — Paul’s Apostleship, 206 — Ephesians : non- Pauline, 
207 — Date, 208 — Philippians : reasons for accepting it as Paul’s, 209 
— Colossians : its authenticity ; its doctrine of Christ’s nature, 210 — 
First Thessalonians : its authorship, 211 — Second Thessalonians not 
Paul’s, 212 — Timothy and Titus non-Pauline, 212 — Philemon, 213 — 
Jlebrews : not Paul’s ; its Christology, 214, 215 — Order and dates of 
Paul’s Epistles, 216 — Their value and significance, 217 — Paul’s relation 
to the other Apostles, 219 — The Christ of Paul, 220 — His testimony to 
the resurrection, 221 — The Saint and the man, 222. 

SEVENTH LECTURE. 

THE CATHOLIC EPISTLES : REVELATION : ACTS. 

The Catholic Epistles, 223 — Epistle of James, 223 — Nominal au- 
thor, 224 — When written, 225 — Anti-Pauline, 226 — First Peter : its 
. date and author, 226 — Its conciliatory tendency, 227 — More Pauline 
than Petrine, 228 — Catholic party, 228 — Second Peter, 229 — Earliest 
mention of the New Testament as “Scriptures,” 230 — The Epistles 
of John, 229 — Relation to the Fourth Gospel, 232-235— Jude, 235 — 
The Apocalypse : its enigmatic character, 237 — Nature of its predic- 
tions, 238 — Authorship, 240 — Date, 244 — Object, 245 — Contents, 246 


XIV 


CONTENTS. 


— Fortunes of the book, 249 — Acts of the Apostles, 249 — Contents* 
250-252 — Authorship, 253 — Characteristics, 253 — Its untrustworthi- 
ness, 254-259 — A theological romance, 259 — Its tendency % 259 — 
Date, 260. 


EIGHTH LECTURE. 

THE FOUR GOSPELS. 

Importance of the subject, 262 — Our only source of information 
about Jesus, 263 — Synoptics : why so called, 265 — How they differ 
from the Fourth, 265 — Matthew, 267 — Contents, 268 — Characteristics, 
269 — Second Coming of Jesus, 270 — Most Jewish of the Four, 272 — 
Its relation to earlier documents, 272 — Gospel of the Messiah, 273 — 
Authorship, 273 — Date, 274 — Mark, 275 — Relation to Matthew and 
Luke, 276 — Authorship, 277 — Its purpose, 280 — Its neutral character, 
280 — Gospel of the Son of God, 281 — Vividness of description, 282 — 
Structure ; authenticity of closing verses, 282 — Luke: authorship and 
date, 283 — Contents, 284 — Compared with Matthew and Mark, 285 — 
Object of writer, 286 — Gospel of the Saviour, 286 — Internal divergen- 
cies, 287 — Least Judaic of the Synoptics, 288 — The Fourth Gospel : 
its relation to the Synoptics, 288 — Differences from them, 290-294 — 
Miracles, 294 — Dualism, 295 — Manner of Jesus’ teaching, 295 — Ab- 
sence of parables, 296 — General arrangement, 297 — Contents, 298 — 
Not a biography : not John’s, 300 — External evidence of authorship, 
301 — Literary morality, 302 — Its influence, 303 — Conclusion, 304. 


A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 


OF THE 

OLD TESTAMENT, APOCRYPHAL, AND NEW TESTA- 
MENT LITERATURE. 

[The dates are nearly all more or less approximate.* Those which are es- 

S ecially doubtful are indicated by a mark of interrogation. A few extra- 
iblical books referred to in the following pages are printed in Italics.] 


THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

ANCIENT FRAGMENTS, 1320-800 B. C. 

b. c. 

Ten Commandments in germ, 1320 ? 

Deborah’s Song and other legends of the Book of Judges, 11 50-1050 

Jacob’s Blessing, Gen. xlix., 1100-1050 

Early documents, legends, Wars of Yahweh , Book of 

Jasher , etc., imbedded in fhe later Histories, . . 1000-800 

Book of Covenants, Ex. xxi-xxiii., 19, . . 850 ? 


PROPHETIC AND CONTEMPORANEOUS LITERATURE, 
800-500 B. C. 


Amos, ..... 
Song of Solomon, 

Psalm xlv., . 

Hosea, 

Moses’ Blessing, Deut. xxxiii., 
Zechariah ix-xi., 

Proverbs, x-xxn., 16; xxv-xxix.,. 
Isaiah (greater part of) I-XXXIH., 

Micah, 

Moses’ Song, Deut. xxxn., 

“ Ode, Ex. xv., 1-19, . 


B. c. 
800-770 
800 ? 
800 ? 

775-745 

780? 

735 
730-700 
740-710 
720 
725 ? 
775-725 ? 


XVI 


CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 


Prophetic Narratives of Gen., Ex., Num. ( First form of 
Pentateuch , including “Book of Covenants”); also 
prophetic narratives of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and 
Kings ; also a few Psalms, ..... 800-700 

Nahum, 635 ? 

Zephaniah, ......... 626 

Jeremiah, 626-584 

Deuteronomy, 621 

“ fused with the.“ Prophetic Narratives ” by 
the Deuteronomist, making the Second form of Penta- 
teuch and book of J oshua, 620 

Proverbs I-IX., 620? 

Job 608 ? 

Habbakuk, 596 

Zechariah, xil-xiv 592 

Joel, 590 ? 

Ezekiel, 592-570 

Lamentations, 584 

Psalms, a few Fall of Jerusalem, 586-550 

Obadiah, 580 

Judges, Samuel and Kings assume their present form, 590-540 

Isaiah, xl-lxvi., etc., Babylonia, 540-536 

“ XXXIV, XXXV., “ .... 540-536 

“ xxtv-xxvn., Jerusalem 525-520 

Haggai, . . . 520 

Zechariah, i-viil., 520 


AGE OF PRIESTLY AUTHORS, 500-200 B. C. 

[There is a marked fore-feeling of this age in Zechariah, i-viii, in Deu- 
teronomy, in Haggai, and most conspicuously in Ezekiel.] 

B. C 

Psalms, many 500-400 

Book of Origins, including priestly laws and narratives of 
Gen., Ex., Numbers, Leviticus and Joshua; drawn 
up in Babylonia, 536-458. Fused with Second Form 
of Pentateuch and Deuteronomic Joshua, described 
above, and published at Jerusalem by Ezra and 
Nehemiah in 444-45, making the Third form of 
Pentateuch (our present Pentateuch, with some few 
exceptions) and present book of Joshua,. . . 445-444 

Malachi, ......... 450-430 ? 


CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 


XVII 


Ruth, 420 ? 

Jonah, 420 ? 

Psalms, many ; Grand era of temple song and temple 

poetry, . . 400-30C 

Memoirs of Ezra and Nehemiah, .... 445-425 

Chronicles, ^ . 300-250 

Memoirs of Ezra and Nehemiah fused with Chronicles, 300-250 

Book of Baruch (Apocrypha), 300 

More Psalms, . 300-200 

Esther, 250 ? 

Ecclesiastes, ' . . 225 ? 

Septuagint translation of the Law, .... 275- ? 


APOCRYPHAL AND APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE, 


200 B. C.-IOO A. D. 


B. c. 

Daniel, 165 

Psalms xliv— lxxiv— cxvill. 170-160 

Septuagint translation continues, 200-100 

, Apocrypha : 

Ecclesiasticus, 180 

Tobit, 175 

Additions to Esther 200-100 ? 

First Esdras, 100-1 

Susanna, Bel and Dragon, and Three Holy Children, 165-100 ? 

First Maccabees, 120-80 ? 

Second Maccabees, 100-50 ? 

Judith, 100 ? 

Prayer of Manasses, 50-1 

Wisdom of Solomon, A. d. 40 ? 

Second Esdras, A. D. 75-100 ? 

Extra-Biblical, Enochs . . . . B. c. 100-A. D. 50 ? 

Sibyls, . . . . t . B. c. 106-50 

Book of Jubilees , Ascension of Moses , 

Psalms of Solomon , . . . B. c. 40-1 

Talmud growing, . . B. c. 300-A. D. 300 

Hillel, .... B. c. 36-A. D. 6 

Philo , .... B. C. 10— A. D. 60 

Josephus A. D. 37-95 


XVIII 


CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 


NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE. 


53-170 A. D. 


Life-time of Jesus of Nazareth,* . 


THE 

GENUINE 

EPISTLES 

OF 

ST. PAUL. 


' First Thessalonians, 
First Corinthians, 
Second Corinthians, 
Galatians, 

Romans, 

Philemon, 
Colossians, . 

^ Philippians, 


B. C. 4-A.D. 29 


53 ? 
57 

57 

58 
58 
62 

62 

63 


A. D. 

“ Many taking in hand [Luke I., 1,] to set forth in order a 
declaration ” of the traditions current concerning the life 
and ministry of Jesus : Logia of Matthew, 68 ; Marcion’s 


Gospel ; a primitive Mark ; Gospel of the Hebrews, . 70-100 

Hebrews, ......... 66 

General Epistle of James, ....... 68 

Apocalypse, 69 

Second Thessalonians, 69 ? 

Ephesians, 75 ? 

First Epistle of Peter, . . . . . . 80 ? 

Epistle of Jude, . 80 ? 

Gospel of Matthew, 100 ? 

Gospel of Luke 115 ? 

Gospel of Mark, 120 ? 

Epistle to Titus, 120 ? 

Epistles to Timothy, 120 ? 

Acts of the Apostles, 125 ? 

First Epistle of John, 130 ? 

Second and Third Epistles of John, .... 130-135 

Gospel of John, 135-150 

Second Epistle of Peter, 170 ? 


BOOKS IN OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS AND 

APOCRYPHA 

IN THE ORDER OF OUR COMMON VERSION. 

With page-references to their treatment in the following pages. 


OLD 



PAGE 


PAGE 


PAGE 

GENESIS . 43-48 

II. CHRONICLES . 

62 

DANIEL . 

17 

EXODUS . 

68 

EZRA 

65 

HO SEA . 

19 

LEVITICUS . 

log 

NEHEMIAH . 

65 

JOEL 

21 

NUMBERS . 

1 eg 

ESTHER . 

66 

AMOS . 

22 

DEUTERONOMY 

102 

JOB 

145 

OBADIAH . 

23 

JOSHUA . 

5 i 

PSALMS . 

ng 

JONAH . 

23 

JUDGES 

53 

PROVERBS . 

131 

MICAH 

24 

RUTH 

57 

ECCLESIASTES . 

135 

NAHUM 

25 

I. SAMUEL . 

58 

SONG OF SOLOMON 

140 

HABAKKUK 

25 

II. SAMUEL 

58 

ISAIAH 

12 

ZEPHANIAH . 

26 

I. KINGS 

60 

JEREMIAH . 

14 

HAGGAI . 

26 

II. KINGS . 

60 

LAMENTATIONS 

14 

ZECHARIAH . 

26 

I. CHRONICLES 

62 

EZEKIEL 

15 

MALACHI . 

27 



APOCRYPHA. 





PAGE 



PAGE 

FIRST ESDRAS 

• 

160 BARUCH . 

. 

• • • 

175 

SECOND ESDRAS 

• 

l6l SONG OF THE THREE HOLY CHILDREN 

175 

TOBIT . 

• 

164 HISTORY OF 

SUSANNA 

175 

JUDITH . 

• 

165 BEL AND THE DRAGON . 

175 

ADDITIONS TO ESTHER 

l68 PRAYER OF MANASSES 

I76 

THE WISDOM OF SOLO- 

FIRST MACCABEES 

• • • 

176 


MON . . . 168 SECOND MACCABEES . . . 1 78 

ECCLESIASTICUS . 171 


NEW TESTAMENT. 


PAGE 

PAGE 


PAGE 

MATTHEW 

267 

EPHESIANS . 

207 

HEBREWS . 

. 217 

MARK . 

275 

PHILIPPIANS 

2og 

JAMES . 

223 

LUKE 

283 

COLOSSIANS . 

210 

I. PETER . 

. 226 

JOHN . 

288 

I. THESSALONIANS 

21 1 

II. PETER 

22g 

THE ACTS 

249 

II. THESSALONIANS 

21 1 

I. JOHN . 

. 231 

ROMANS 

193 

I. TIMOTHY 

212 

II. JOHN 

232 

I. CORINTHIANS 

197 

II. TIMOTHY 

212 

III. JOHN . 

. 232 

II. CORINTHIANS 

201 

TITUS 

212 

JUDE . 

235 

GALATIANS 

204 

PHILEMON . 

213 

REVELATION 

. 237 


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THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY 


FIRST LECTURE. 

THE OLD TESTAMENT: THE PROPHETS. 

It is the distinction of the Bible to be the 
sacred volume of two great religions, the Jewish 
and the Christian. , But while the whole, in- 
cluding the Apocrypha, is sacred to the Roman- 
ist, only the Old Testament and New are sacred 
to the Protestant ; only the Old is sacred to 
the Jew. One could almost say that the Bible 
is the sacred volume of three great religions, so 
largely is the Koran based upon the Bible, or rather 
upon the Talmud in the first remove and on the 
Bible in the second. 

The Bible is a great book and it has had a famous 
history. The science of comparative religion teaches 
nothing more decisively than that the Bible has an 
immense superiority over all the other sacred scrip- 
tures of the world. These may have isolated sen- 
tences of equal, or of greater spiritual significance, 
but they have no such average beauty and signifi- 
cance. The superior divinity of the Bible has for 
the most part engrossed the zeal of its defenders. 
But what I care for most is its superior humanity. 
Homer is not a whit more human. And what a his- 


2 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


tory it has had! Consider what the Old Testament 
has been to the Jewish people — a nation without a 
country now for eighteen centuries, — in all their 
homeless wanderings. It was their consolation 
through a thousand years of Christian persecu- 
tion. Consider too what it has been to Protestant 
Christians : the charter of their freedom from the 
jurisdiction of the Pope; an armory of texts against 
idolatry and priestly domination ; to French Hu- 
guenots and Scotch covenanters, and Dutch Repub- 
licans, and English Presbyterians and Puritans, a 
nurse of heroes, teaching them many a song of bat- 
tle, many a hope of final victory. If, in our time, 
the Southern slave-holder found sanction in it for 
his creed, not less did Green* and Garrison for theirs, 
interpreting, as it had not been interpreted for more 
than two millennia, the spirit of the ancient He- 
brew prophecy. 

Surely a book with such a history and such a 
fame and such intrinsic value merits the carefullest 
consideration. It has been before the world so 
long — its youngest chapters 1700 years — and has 
been so much read and studied that it would seem 
as if it ought to have been fully comprehended long 
ago. But please remember that until the Protes- 
tant reformation the Bible was hidden from the com- 
mon-people in the priestly ark of an unspoken lan- 
guage ; that only for about three centuries has it 
been read in the vernacular, that a little further 
back the New Testament was assailed by Romanists 
as a composition of the Devil, that even the scholar- 

♦Beriah Green, President of the first Anti-Slavery Convention. 


THE OLD TESTAMENT. 


3 


ship which hung over the Bible with unwearying 
patience was, before Erasmu^, both superstitious and 
uncritical to the last degree. Since then there has 
been a steady progress in the direction of a more 
scientific comprehension of its character ; a progress 
illustrated by such names as Semler and Astruc, 
and Michaelis and Eichhorn, and DeWette and 
Strauss, and Baur and Ewald, and last and best of 
all Kuenen, the great Dutch scholar, no greater 
man, perhaps, than many of his predecessors, but 
entering into their labors, having the benefit of their 
mistakes, and so arriving at an understanding of the 
Old Testament in comparison with which even the 
light of Ewald seems dark and his results irrational. 


As yet however, so far as 1 can judge, the new 
criticism has made but very little impression upon 
the popular estimation of the Bible and the uses to 
which it is put. Even ministers who are acquainted 
with it and who substantially accept it, go on using 
the Bible as if nothing had happened, when some- 
thing has happened of fundamental interest and 
importance. As for the average disciple in our 
Protestant communities, the Bible is for him what it 
was for h,is fathers. It is one book. Its parts are 
all of equal value. A text here is as good as a text 
there or anywhere; Old Testament as good as New, 
despite the motion that Christianity was some sort of 
an advance on Judaism. He still quotes it as infal- 
lible ; still wastes his time in harmonizing it with 


4 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


science or history, or making history and science 
harmonize with it. If he does not, like some one I 
have heard of, emphasize every word that is in ital- 
ics, so printed because not in the original, has he 
discovered that the chronology of the Bible dates 
from Archbishop Usher in 1660, or that the divis- 
ions into chapters and verses were not a part of the 
original, in which there were neither, but one solid 
mass of words, without divisions of any sort, with 
out capitals or punctuation, the Hebrew even with- 
out vowels, the cause no doubt of thousands ol 
mistakes? Not until 1551 was the Bible printed 
with the present arrangement of chapters and verses 
by Henry Stephens, the greatest printer-scholar of 
that time, who versified the whole New Testament 
on his way from Paris to Lyons. The arrangement 
in both respects though generally convenient has 
frequently obscured the sense and broken the con- 
nection, and the verse arrangement especially has 
been a fruitful source of textual polemics, resulting 
in bad blood and worse theology. In some respects 
the average modern Christian is at a disadvantage 
compared with Bible-readers of two centuries ago, 
for then it was commonly known that all of the 
chapter-headings, and running titles, except those 
of the Psalms, date from the authorized version of 
1611. With the modern Christian they are general- 
ly of equal value and authority with the text, 
though frequently misleading and sometimes, as in 
the case of those attached to the Song of Songs, ridic- 
ulously foreign to the subject matter of the poem. 
Equally so are many of the chapter-headings and 


THE OLD TESTAMENT. 


5 


the running titles of the Prophets and the Penta- 
teuch. But these superficial misconceptions are as 
nothing in comparison with others which inhere in 
the essential character of the Bible, the authorship 
and date and character of its constituent parts and 
by consequence their value as a spiritual and eccle- 
siastical authority. In a course of eight lectures, 
with such helps as I can get, I am going to review 
the contents of the Bible with a view to helping 
those who come to hear me to a more rational appre- 
ciation of their spiritual significance. Within such 
narrow limits the work cannot be thoroughly well 
done, but if we all do our best, you to hear and I to 
speak, we shall accomplish something I am sure. 
Certain to be shunned by those who are “ joined to 
their idols” I trust through you to sow a little of 
the good seed of truth in their inhospitable fields. 


The BIBLE. — That is to say, the book, The Book. 
But this designation of the collection of writings, 
which we are about to consider, is only about five 
centuries old. Before that, the Bible was not called 
Ton Biblion, the Book, but Ta Biblia, The Books, a 
much exacter designation ; one which, if it had been 
retained, would have done something to prevent the 
almost universal misconception that the Bible is one 
book and not a collection of books, the various off- 
spring of a thousand years and more of literary 
activity. Even the plural form Ta Biblia , The 
Books, was never used till the 5th century. Before 


6 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


that they were generally spoken of as The Scrip* 
tures, though this designation had not then long in- 
cluded the scriptures of the New as well as those of 
the Old Testament. 

The Bible, at its maximum, includes the Old Tes- 
tament, the Apocrypha and the New Testament. 
All these together make up the Bible of the Roman 
Catholic Church, except that the two books of Esdras 
and the prayer of Manasses in the Apocrypha, though 
admitted with the rest, are admitted as apocryphal. 
These parts in their entirety represent a chronologic 
order, but where they border on each other they 
sometimes overlap. Thus, the book of Daniel in 
the Old Testament was written later than The Wis- 
dom of Jesus the Son of Sirach and Baruch in the 
Apocrypha, and the second book of Esdras in the 
Apocrypha was very possibly written later than 
some of the New Testament Epistles of St. Paul. 
Let us first consider the Old Testament. 

In our common English version it includes thirty- 
nine books. They have a general arrangement in 
two parts, as prose and poetry. The first division 
ends with Esther , the seventeenth book. The 
second begins with Job , and ends with Malaclii. 
This arrangement is very different from the Jewish, 
which has three grand divisions, the Law , the Proph- 
ets, and the Writings. The Law includes the first five 
books. The Prophets include Joshua , Judges , Sam- 
uel , Kings , (these are called the Earlier Prophets) ; 
Isaiah , Jeremiah , and Ezekiel , and the twelve minor 
prophets which are the last twelve books in our 
English Bible. The Writings include, and in this 


THE OLD TESTAMENT. 


7 


order, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, The Song of Songs, 
Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, 
Ezra , Nehemiah, First and Second Chronicles . Origi- 
nally the Law included Joshua, and the Prophets in- 
cluded the Psalms. 

If this general arrangement had been retained, the 
chronological order of the books would be a good 
deal less of a muddle than it is now, though it 
would still be far enough from accurate. But it 
would at least correspond to the order in which the 
different books of the Old Testament came to be 
considered, first precious, then sacred, by the Jew- 
ish people. Before the Babylonish captivity there 
were no sacred writings in Judea. There were some 
laws, and some of the writings of the prophets, and 
some historical compositions, and some of these, no 
doubt, were highly valued, but no special character 
was attached to them, no peculiar authority assigned 
to them. And this, you must remember was about 
800 years after the time of Moses. Soon after the 
captivity, in the fifth century, B. C., the law appeared, 
and soon after came to be considered sacred. Not 
long after it would seem that Nehemiah* made a 
collection of histories and prophecies, together with 
the psalms that had appeared up to this time, not 
with any idea of putting them on a level with the 
law, but only to preserve them from destruction. 
Nevertheless, in course of time they came to be re- 
garded as almost, or quite as sacred as the Law. 
Again as time went on, there appeared other writ- 
ings, and older ones came to be more regarded for one 
*2 Macc., II. 13. 


8 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


reason and another, and so, somewhere along in the 
first century before Christ, these were collected, and 
in another century or two had come to be regarded 
as almost, and quite as sacred as the Law and the 
Prophets — the two former collections. The Old 
Testament was now complete. But some of the 
books included in it did not get in at all easily. 
There was much opposition to their admission by 
the learned doctors of the synagogue: to Ezekiel , 
because it didn’t tally with the Law — a genuine criti- 
cal perception as we shall see hereafter* — to Esther , 
because from beginning to end there was no men- 
tion of God ; to Ecclesiastes , because it was positively 
irreligious ; to the Song of Solomon, because it seemed 
to be a pretty song of love and nothing more. But 
the objections to these books were finally overcome. 
There was another difficulty. There were more 
than a million Jews in Egypt; thousands of them in 
Alexandria ; these had a learned synagogue, which 
undertook the translation of tne sacred books. You 
have all heard of this translation, called the Septua- 
gint, and there is a very pretty story about how 
seventy different translators were shut up in seventy 
different cells, and each translated the whole of the 
Old Testament, and when they compared their 
translations there wasn’t a particle of difference. 
In fact the translation was called the Septuagint, 
because it issued from the Sanhedrim of seventy 
members. It was not made deliberately or all at 
once, but very gradually. It was begun about 300 
B. C., while several of the Old Testament books were 

* Third lecture. 


THE OLD TESTAMENT . 


9 


still unwritten. It was not concluded* until some- 
time in the first Christian century. But when con- 
cluded it contained not only the Old Testament as 
we now have it, but all of the Apocrypha besides, its 
books intermingled with the “ writings ” of the third 
collection, as if they were of equal value. In Judea 
the temptation was strong to admit some of these 
books. At the dawn of Christianity they were 
knocking for admission to the canon. * But for this 
dawn, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the dis- 
persion of the nation, it is very likely they would 
have been admitted. As it was they never were, 
and the books of our Old Testament are the books 
of the Hebrew canon to this day; only, as I have 
said, arranged in a very different, and considering 
the gradual course of their adoption, much better 
order. 

Thus, all too briefly, I have given you a history of 
the canon (which means list) of the Old Testament. 
I am now in search of positive rather than negative 
conclusions, but I cannot resist pausing a moment 
to ask you, what probability or possibility is there, 
that a collection of books drifting together in this 
way in the course of 500 years, accidentally admitting 
some and omitting others of much greater value, 
anonymous in the majority of its constituent parts — 
what probability or possibility is there, that such a 
collection is an infallible, or in any way, a special 
revelation of the invisible God, as such to be used 
as an authority to obstruct the path of science, or 
enlighten us in matters of theology ? But this his- 
tory of the canon will be further illustrated as we 

* As a canon. The latest books were not translations. 


IO 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


consider the separate books of the Old Testament, 
and then, if I am not mistaken, the impression made 
by such a cursory view as we have taken will be in- 
tensified a thousand times. 


My general subject for this evening is the Old 
Testament; my special subject is the prophets. 
But why the prophets first of all, when in our Eng- 
lish Bible they are last of all ? Indeed, I can conceive 
that the order of my lectures from beginning to end, 
would seem a dreadful putting of the cart before the 
horse to any average popular religionist. For the 
Old Testament, first the Prophets , then the Histor- 
ies , then the Law ! For the New Testament, first 
the Epistles , and then the Revelation, and the Gospels 
last of all ! But this arrangement is by no means 
accidental. It is intended to be roughly chrono- 
logical. Parts of the Law and parts of the Histories 
were written before the Prophets. Some of the 
Epistles were written before some of the Gospels . 
Yet on the average the Prophets are much earlier than 
the Law, and a little earlier than the Histories ; and 
on the average the Epistles are earlier than the Gos- 
pels. But by the average reader, the books of the 
Bible are supposed to be arranged in chronological 
order. The Pentateuch is supposed to have been 
written by Moses, and the books of Samuel by 
Samuel, and all or nearly all the Psalms by David, 
and all the Prophets by the writers whose names they 
bear, and at the times specified in the margin. So 
with the writings of the New Testament. These 


THE PROPHETS. 


IK 


also are supposed to be arranged in chronologic 
order. But we shall find that they are not. It 
would be hard to overestimate the amount of mis- 
conception that has arisen out of the mal-arrange- 
ment of the different books of the Bible. You will 
find no less a writer than John Stuart Mill* basing 
an argument upon the order of the Old Testament 
writings, as if it were chronological ; referring to the 
Pentateuch , as if it were several hundred years earlier 
than the Prophets, when in fact, except fragments 
imbedded in it here and there, it was two or three 
hundred years later. 

First the Prophets, also because they are the bed 
rock, the hard pan, from which we must start to 
build with any satisfaction or security. We ought 
to proceed from the known to the unknown, and in 
good part, we know the prophets, who they were and 
when they wrote, and from their conscious and un- 
conscious testimony we strike out in both directions; 
into the past behind them ; into the future which 
they did so much to form. This is the new criticism. 
This is the principle of Kuenen, which has proved a 
key to mysteries which have baffled scholarship for 
half a century, and which revolutionizes the popular 
conception of the order of Old Testament ideas, sub- 
stituting evolution for revelation as a sufficient ex- 
planation of everything we find from Genesis to 
Malachi . 

“The Prophets” of my present subject, do not 
mean the Prophets of the Jewish tri-pa rtite division 
of the Old Testament. That, I have told you, in- 

* Rep. Government, pp. 41. 42, Eng. Ed. 


52 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


eludes Joshua, Judges, ” Kings and Samuel, as “ the 
earlier prophets.” And that does not include the 
book of Daniel nor Lamentatioyis , both of which I 
shall include. “ The Prophets ” of my subject mean 
all the prophets of our English Bible from Isaiah to 
Malachi. I am strongly tempted to speak of them 
in chronological order, but it would require so much 
jumping forward and back, that you might get con- 
fused. So I will take them as they stand, and after- 
ward give you a list of them as near as may be 
chronological. 

First in the list stands Isaiah, and if the books 
had been arranged in order of merit, he would 
stand here with perfect right. In a chronological 
order he would be the third or fourth. He began 
to prophesy a year or two before Uzziah’s death 
(757), and kept on into the second half of Heze- 
kiah’s reign, say to 703, B. C. He had a wife and 
children ; his father’s name was Amoz ; he is said 
in Chronicles to have written a life of King Uzziah. 
And this is all we know about his personal history. 
Of all the prophets he has the loftiest style, the 
most poetical. The book which bears his name 
contains sixty-six chapters, and it is habitually 
quoted from, and argued from, by Christian minis- 
ters as if it were all of one piece, and written by 
Isaiah. The marginal date of the latest prophecies 
in our English Bible is 712, and the chapter head- 
ings and running titles are adapted to keep up the 
illusion. But in fact not more than half of the 
whole book was written by Isaiah. Chapters XIII., 
9 to xiv.. 23; xi., 1 to 10; xxiv. to xxvii.; 


THE PROPHETS. 13 

XXXIV. to XXXIX. are none of them Isaiah’s. 
The last four of these chapters are evidently an 
editor’s appendix to the original Isaiah. The two 
previous belong to the time of the captivity. And 
so do all the chapters after the thirty-ninth. “ Com- 
fort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God,” be- 
gins the fortieth chapter, and from this point on to 
the end of the sixty-sixth chapter we have the 
words of some one writing two hundred years after 
the true Isaiah, probably at Babylon. Some of the 
earlier chapters which are not Isaiah’s, probably be- 
long to the same author. The critics speak of him 
as the Great Unknown, or as the D enter o- 
Isaiah .* For a long time there has been a 
steadily increasing agreement among scholars in 
regard to his separate authorship, and now there is 
not a respectable scholar who is not convinced of 
it. Read the whole book for yourselves, and you 
will see the lines of separation. The true Isaiah 
and the Great Unknown are talking of entirely diff- 
erent things. Their stand-points are different ; their 
styles are different ; their aims are different. The 
great subject of the latter is the deliverance of the 
Israelites from their captivity, and their return to 
their own land, while in the true Isaiah this cap- 
tivity does not even threaten on the remotest verge 
of the prophetic horizon. No wonder, seeing that 
it was still a hundred years and more in the future 
at the time of his death. You will see at once how 
fruitful of misconception must have been this print- 
ing as one book the writings of two great prophets, 
* Dean Stanley calls him “ the Evangelical Prophet.” 


14 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


one of the eighth, and the other of the sixth cen- 
tury, B. c. You will see how much wonder must 
have been wasted over prophecies which were al- 
most or quite contemporaneous with the events. 
You will see how little literary skill and conscience 
went to the editing of the Old Testament books, 
for this is not an isolated example, and how blas- 
phemous it is to saddle the Almighty with the re- 
sults of so much human imperfection. Let me say 
in passing that “ the servant of Yahweh,” who plays 
such a conspicuous part in the Deutero-Isaiah , 
the description of whom has always been applied to 
the Messiah, “ He is despised and rejected, 
etc.,”* is not Messianic at all. It is the true Israel 
which is described; that is, those Jews who during 
their captivity were faithful to their national re- 
ligion. 

The next book in the Old Testament is the book 
of the Prophet Jeremiah. About 625, B. C., says the 
marginal date. Say for the whole of his career from 
626 to 584, B. c. So his beginning was almost a 
hundred years after the end of Isaiah; his end two 
years after the destruction of Jerusalem. The La- 
mentations which follow his book in our Bible are 
also his. In a strictly chronological order he would 
be about the twelfth. No such liberties have been 
taken with him as with Isaiah, but the last three 
chapters (fifty, fifty-one and fifty-two) are from an . 
other hand. These date from about the middle of 
the captivity. The first two are a prophecy against 
Babylon ; the third is an historical appendix almost 

* Isaiah LIII. 


THE PROPHETS. 


15 


verbally identical with a passage in the book of 
Kings* All that is really Jeremiah’s falls into two 
sections : the first, Chapters I. — XLV., is made up 
of prophecies concerning the Hebrew state and 
religion ; the second, Chapters XLVI. — XLIX., is 
made up of prophecies against foreign nations. 
Jeremiah was a very melancholy prophet, so much 
so that his name has passed into a proverb, and we 
call any address or writing that is full of dark fore- 
bodings a Jeremiad. His sense of Israel’s sin 
against Yahweh was so overpowering that he could 
prophesy evil, and evil only. There were other 
prophets who prophesied “ smooth things,” and 
what with theje and the kings and people whose 
vices he rebuked, Jeremiah had a hard, hard time. 
Much has been made of his prophecy of Israel’s 
restoration after seventy years. But his seventy 
was a round number, and there is no possible way 
of making the captivity seventy. It was only fifty 
years from the destruction of Jerusalem to the re- 
turn ; only sixty-one years from the carrying off of 
the 10,000, in 597, B. C. Moreover, such a prophecy 
has such a tendency to fulfil itself that if it had 
been literally fulfilled, it would be only what we 
might expect. But Jeremiah prophesied the return 
of the ten tribes as well as Judah. Defenders of 
predictive prophecy do not say much about this. 
They are generally as silent about unfulfilled proph- 
ecies as the revivalists are about unanswered prayers. 

Next comes Ezekiel , third in the Biblical order, 
thirteenth in the chronological, but very properly 
*2 Kings. XXIV., 18, and XXV., 30. 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


26 

immediately after Jeremiah . A priest of Jerusalem, 
he was one of the 10,000 who were carried off to 
Babylon in 597, eleven years before the destruction 
of his native city. At Babylon his prophetic ac- 
tivity lasted twenty-two years. Ewald calls him “ a 
writer rather than a prophet/’ In him we find the 
first traces of that ultra-priestly legislation which was 
soon to attain a wonderful development in the 
hands of kindred spirits.* In Ezekiel also we find 
the first striking example of what is called apoca- 
lyptic writing, that is writing made up of splendid 
artificial visions of coming events. The other great 
examples of it in the Bible are the book of Daniel 
and the Apocalypse of John or Revelation , and the 
Apocryphal books of Enoch and Esdras , the former 
only in the Ethiopic Bible. Kuenen discovers in 
him a sort of Hebrew Calvin, severe and narrow, 
and never recoiling from the logical consequences 
of his essential principles. But certainly he was 
much more of a poet ; he had much more imagin- 
ation than the Genevan reformer. His book, like 
Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s, was a record of his prophe- 
cies written out at the end of his life. Other pro- 
phetic books have the same character. It was the 
general character of written prophecy. Naturally 
enough the prophet’s memory of his prophecies 
sometimes got mixed a little with the actual events 
which followed them. It could not have been other- 
wise. We have reason to believe that Ezekiel’s 
memory was particularly fallacious. At any rate 
! in judging of the prophecies, we ought never to 
* See Lecture III. 


THE PROPHETS. 


1 7 


forget that almost without exception they were ! 
written out long after they were uttered, and that ! 
afterward from time to time they were edited and 
re-edited again and again, and made to agree with 
subsequent events. When people say, “ I told you ) 
so,” it does not always mean they told you exactly J 
so, but only something of that sort. The last eight 
chapters, of Ezekiel are a wonderful treasure house 
for the modern scientific critic. They could never 
have been written if the priestly legislation of the 
Pentateuch had been in existence at the time. Many 
of their particulars would have been superfluous; 
others would have been simply blasphemous. He 
tells us why the sons of Aaron were to be the only 
priests. But the priestly legislation of the Penta- 
teuch makes it appear that they had always been 
the only priests by supernatural decree. No wonder 
the doctors of the synagogue hesitated to admit 
Ezekiel into the Canon ! When the Temple was 
rebuilt, his plan, as furnished in his fortieth and 
succeeding chapters, was not followed. Its ground 
plan would have occupied the total area of the city. 
This again is one of the prophecies about which 
little is said by the apologists. 

Next after Ezekiel , Daniel. The logical order is cor- 
rect but not the chronological. Daniel is the next great 
Apocalyptist but his true date is 425 years after that 
of Ezekiel , about 165 years B.C. He would be the last 
of the prophets in a chronological order, if he were 
indeed a prophet. But he can hardly be considered 
one, his whole genius and method are so entirely 
different from that of the great prophets of the eighth 


x8 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


century, B. C., who give to prophecy its typical form. 
The book of Daniel was the last book admitted into 
the Jewish canon, and it was admitted very grudg- 
ingly. It was never placed among the Prophets by 
the Jews. It was left for Christians to perpetrate 
^ this piece of literary folly. True it professes to have 
been written, after the sixth chapter, in the time of 
the captivity. 537 B. C., is the marginal date, which 
is based upon the text. It is a description of visions 
had by the prophet Daniel in Babylon. No other 
book of the Old Testament has played a greater 
part in the development of Christian ideas. It was 
the great stronghold of the defenders of predictive 
prophecy in England, in the eighteenth century. 
But now its gates are broken down. Its wall is flat. 
There is not a respectable critic who disputes that 
it was written in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, 
from 170 to 165 B. C. The writer’s object was to 
strengthen the faithful among the Jewish people 
under the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes, and to 
encourage them with the hope of speedy deliver- 
ance. Even as an acknowledged fiction it was well 
adapted to its purpose. How much better as a 
veritable prophecy of the time of the captivity. This 
it professed to be. Speaking squarely, it was a 
pious fraud. It was ^ pious. The man who wrote 
the book was an earnest patriot ; filled with an hon- 
est hatred of injustice. He had a noble end in view : 
to strengthen and console his fellow-countrymen. He 
thought it justified the means. But these were 
fraudulent. A book written 165 B. C., was put forth 
as a book written 537 B. C. But the subjective im* 


THE PROPHETS. 


19 


morality of such an act as this was not then what it 
would be now. Then there was not the sense of 
ownership in books that there is now. The copyist 
easily glided into the redactor. He added and he 
took away to suit his own ideas. It was a very com- 
mon thing, especially a little later in the first Chris- , 
tian centuries, to try to float one’s book with the * 
great name of some apostle or father in the church. 
The apocryphal books of Esdras are a case in r 
point, Esdras being the Greek form of Ezra, and ) 
these books written hundreds of years after his death ( 
pretending to be written by him. Other instances are 
the Wisdom of Solomon , the book of Enoch attri- 
buted in the New Testament to “ the seventh from 
Adam,” but actually written a little before Christ, 
and some of jt a little after ; in the NewTestament 
the fourth Gospel, and various Epistles. 

The next twelve books in the Old Testament after 
Daniel are the Twelve Minor Prophets , so-called be- 
cause they are of minor length, not because, as 
Thomas Paine absurdly fancied, they are of minor 
importance. Hosea is the first. His marginal date in 
the Bible is 785 B. C., and this is not far from right. 
Say from 775 to 745 for his entire career. In a true 
chronological order, he would be the second of all 
the prophets. Whereas he is now the fifth. He 
was a native of Northern Israel. His book is an ab- 
stract of his prophecies prepared by himself. The 
amount is very small compared with many a modern 
prophet’s twelve or fifteen hundred sermons, but 
there may be a difference in quality. There are 
only fourteen chapters in the book. The first three 


20 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


are very astonishing. Hosea represents himself as 
marrying an adulterous woman as a sign that Yah- 
weh* has made Israel his wife. As Hosea’s wife 
proves unfaithful to him, so does Israel to Yahweh. 
The figure is carried out with immense freedom and 
force. It has generally been supposed by Christian 
scholars, that Hosea actually did this monstrous 
thing at the command of the Eternal. Even so 
euphemistic a critic as Dean Stanley accepts the 
V story of Hosea as the truth. But a wiser criticism 
assures us that the adulterous wife and children of 
Hosea, with their queer names, Unfavored and Not 
my people , are purely symbolic, and so the character 
of Hosea, as well as that of the Almighty is re- 
deemed. His is a very stirring prophecy, full of 
hatred of the bull-worship of Yahweh that was com- 
mon in his day, but with an intenser hatred for in- 

*1 shall use this name instead of Jehovah throughout these lectures. 
A more correct spelling would be Jahveh, but as Jahveh should be 
pronounced Yahweh I adopt the phonetic spelling. Jehovah is en- 
tirely incorrect. The Hebrew consonants were J II V H. When 
this became “ the ineffable name,” too sacred to be spoken, the scribes, 
when reading the scriptures, substituted for it Adonai, Lord ; and for 
Lord Jhvh, they substituted Elohim , God. When at length it became 
customary to write the vowels, which had before been simply under- 
stood, instead of taking the vowels originally understood with JHVH 
the rabbis took either the vowels belonging to Adonai or to Elohim , 
making it either Jehovah or Jehovih. (The first a in Adonai is like e 
mute in French, and the final i is /, a consonant.) Where Lord oc- 
curs in our common version, it generally represents JHVH in the 
original which it does not translate at all, but follows the septuagint, 
where JHVH is always rendered K vpioc, Lord, an exact transla- 
tion of Adonai. The name Jehovah only occurs twice in our transla- 
tion, when the time name should occur a hundred times. 

But if not the vowels e , o, a, what vowels should be written with- 
J H V H? The consensus of scholarship is for a and £ making Jahveh. 
But the J is pronounced Y, as is in Hallelujah, and the v should 
have the sound of w. Hence, phonetically Yahweh , the final h of 
which is silent. See a complete discussion of this matter in an appen- 
dix to Ewald’s Hist. Israel, Vol. II., by Mr. Russell Martineau. 


THE PROPHETS. 


21 


justice and oppression. He is unsparing in his de- 
nunciations of the priests. Wonderful is his love 
for Israel, and his faith that when Yahwehhas pun- 
ished her sufficiently for her sins he will restore her 
to his favor. After his time, the comparison of 
Yahweh to a faithful husband and Israel to an un- 
faithful wife became more and more common. Hun- 
dreds of changes are rung upon it here and there. 
If it did not originate with Hosea it received from 
him a great impulse. 

The next prophet in the Bible list is Joel , and un- 
til lately it has been supposed that he was not much 
out of place in being here. Ewald, in fact, places 
him before Amos and Hosea. But his place has 
always been exceedingly difficult to determine. The 
critics have varied through two or three centuries. 
The Bible date is cir. 800. Judged by the latest 
tests about 600 would be a truer date.* His ideas 
are those of the period immediately preceding the 
captivity, especially his ideas of the temple-service. 
He has an allusion to the garden of Eden, and this 
was not imported from Persia till sometime in the 
seventh century. The book opens with a descrip- 
tion of a fearful plague of locusts and other raven- 
ous insects. “ That which the palmer worm hath 
left hath the locust eaten, and that which the locust 
hath left hath the canker-worm eaten, and that 
which the canker-worm hath left hath the cater- 
pillar eaten.” This plague is sent upon the people 
for their sins. Let them repent and Yahweh will be 
gracious unto them. Joel must always rank among 
* Subsequent to the Captivity of 597 B.c. See Chap. Ill ; 1-3. 


22 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


the greatest of the prophets, not only for the sub- 
limity of his imagery, but also for his lofty views of 
moral obligation. 

Next after Joel we have Amos . His marginal 
date is 787 B. C. This is sufficiently correct. He 
was an elder contemporary of Hosea, and in a chro- 
nological arrangement of the prophets his place 
should be the first. His book is a summary of 
prophecies which he had uttered at different times, 
and afterwards recalled to mind. It makes one’s 
pulses fly to read it even now. Amos was no 
prophet he tells us, neither a son of a prophet, but a 
i herdsman of Tekoa, (a little place, 12 miles south 
of Jerusalem). He means that he was not a pro- 
fessional prophet ; not an “ ordained minister ” or 
“ regular practitioner,” as we should say. Nor the 
son of a prophet — that is not attached to one of the 
schools of the prophets. There were professional 
prophets it seems, who flattered both the vices and 
idolatries of kings and people. And these lived in 
schools or companies. The expression “ schools of 
the prophets ” has been much misunderstood. They 
are sometimes spoken of as colleges. But you have 
heard of schools of fish, meaning aggregations. The 
schools of the prophets were hardly more than this. 
They were not centres of instruction. At any rate, 
Amos cordially detested them. His was no pro- 
fessional utterance. “ When the lion roars.” he 
says, “ who does not tremble ; when Yahweh speaks 
who can but prophesy?” And prophesy he did; 
his prophecy, a turmoil of indignant grief, that Yah- 
weh should be worshipped with idolatrous and lasci- 


THE PROPHETS. 


23 


vious rites, and that men cared more for empty cere- 
monies, than for justice, mercy, and truth. Although 
a native of Judea, it is against the Northern King 
dom that he prophesies, bearding the lion in his den 
at Bethel, very much as if Garrison had lifted up 
his voice at Charleston or Savannah. But his con- 
viction of Israel’s sin was not greater than his con- 
viction of Yahweh’s mercy. He would pity after he 
had punished. Israel should return after her cap- 
tivity, and great should be her glory and prosperity. 
Alas! as spoken of the Northern Kingdom this 
prophecy was destined never to be fulfilled. From 
her captivity there was no return. After her fall in 
719 B. C., there was no resurrection. 

The prophet Obadiah is the next in B?ble order. 
His marginal date is 587. A year or two later would 
be better, for the book was evidently written after 
the fall of Jerusalem, in 586. It consists of but one 
chapter, which denounces vengeance on the Edom- 
ites for rejoicing in the destruction of Jerusalem, 
by the Chaldeans, concluding with a prophecy never 
to be fulfilled, of the territorial extension, and the 
unexampled glory of Judea. 

The marginal date of Jonah , who comes next in 
our Bibles, is 862, B. C., and according to 2 Kings , 
XIV., 25, there was a prophet Jonah who lived in 
the ninth century, B. C., in the time of Jeroboam II. 
But this Jonah was not the author of the book of 
Jonah. There is no pretence that he was. But 
who the author was we do not know. He was 
another Great Unknown. Ay, great for all the fun 
that has been had at the expense of Jonah and the 


24 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


whale, for the book is one of the most significant 
in the Old Testament. It was written somewhere 
along in the fifth century, B. C., about four hundred 
years after the time of Jonah, as a protest against 
the narrowness and exclusiveness of such men as 
Ezra and Nehemiah. It is a fiction, not a history, 
but a didactic fiction, meant to confute the notion 
that Yahweh was the God of the Jews only. Jonah 
is used as a type of the prophets, who, like the 
Scotch minister, did not want to be “ saved in a 
crowd,” did not wan-t to extend the blessings of 
their faith to the outlying nations. Here was a real 
prophecy of Jesus and of Paul, though not a word 
about them or the Messiah, because here was a real 
anticipation of their tenderness and universality. 
Jonah is, perhaps, the most Christian book in the 
Old Testament. Thomas Paine was one of the first 
to perceive its fictitious character and its moral 
drift, and to accord to it his honest admiration. 
Subsequent studies have entirely justified his happy 
intuition. The book of Ruth , as we shall see, ap- 
peared about the same time as Jonah , and in answer 
to the same need. Doubts of the infallibility of 
the Bible have generally begun with Jonah, but 
once let the book be seen in its true character, it 
becomes one of the most precious in the whole col- 
lection. 

The marginal date of Micah is 750, B. C., which 
is not far from right. His prophecies are contem- 
porary with the later prophecies of Isaiah, and in a 
chronological order of the prophets he would be the 
fourth. In manner and spirit he is a good deal like 


THE PROPHETS. 


25 


Isaiah. He has an equal sense of the moral degra- 
tion of the nation, an equal feeling that not sacri- 
fices but righteousness is the one service of Yahweh. 
He denounces the “ false prophets,” by whom here 
we are to understand those who did not insist upon 
the moral service of Yahweh, and those who .still 
encouraged a popular worship of him, associated 
with images and lascivious rites. He predicts 
dreadful woes for Israel and Judah, but like all 
his fellow prophets has a sure and perfect trust in 
better things at last. “Yahweh will turn again. 
He will have compassion on us. He will cast all 
our sins into the depths of the sea.” 

The book of Nahum is dated 713, B. C., almost a 
century too soon. His time was that of King Jo- 
siah, about 630, B. C. Very likely he was an exile 
in Assyria, the Northern Kingdom being captive at 
this time. His book is one continuous prophecy 
against Assyria, suggested probably by a threatened 
invasion of the Scythians. The terms of his predic- 
tion do not correspond with anything that actually 
happened to Assyria at any time. 

Next Habbakuk , whose marginal date is 629, B. C. 
Twenty or even thirty years later would be better. 
Judah is already under the heel of Babylon.* Hab- 
bakuk recognizes that her punishment is just, but 
what are her sins compared to those of her oppres- 
sors? So he proceeds to prophesy their ruin, and to 
comfort his afflicted fellow countrymen. He was one 
of the optimists ; one of the predicters of “ smooth 

*The destruction of Jerusalem in 586 is still in the future, and is 
not anticipated. 


26 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


things,” whom Jeremiah did not like. They did 
not seem to him to understand the depth of Ju- 
dah’s wickedness, and the fearful retribution it 
must necessarily entail. 

The marginal date of Zephaniah , 630, B. C., is as 
correct as need be. The hordes of Scythians who 
awaken Nahum’s hope of the destruction of Assyria, 
awaken Zephaniah’s fear of the destruction of Ju- 
dah. But it was well deserved for her idolatry and 
sin. The Scythians would compass it, but a faith- 
ful remnant would be saved, and long enjoy a glori- 
ous prosperity. The destruction came full soon, but 
not however from the Scythians, and the glorious 
prosperity still awaits some Daniel Deronda to ac- 
complish it. 

The marginal date of Haggai , 520, B. C., is also as 
correct as possible. The captivity was over. The 
rebuilding of the temple had been begun and dis- 
continued. The prophecies of Haggai are exhorta- 
tions to begin, and encouragements to carry on the 
work. His spirit is less moral than ecclesiastical. 
He is one of the least inspired of all the prophets, 
one of the most prosaic. 

Zechariah is put down in the Bible at 520, B. C., 
and this is the true date of the man, who was con- 
temporary with Haggai and whose enthusiasm for 
the rebuilding of the temple he fully shared. His 
prophecies, Chapters I. to VIII., embody this en- 
thusiasm. But the book of Zechariah as it stands 
is not his beyond this chapter. Chapters IX. to 
XI. are by a contemporary of Amos and Hosea, 
two hundred years and more before the time of 


THE PROPHETS. 


27 


Zechariah. Chapters XII. to XIV. are by another 
of the optimistic* prophets, whose view of things 
was too encouraging to suit the prophet Jeremiah. 
Here is another sign how little critical acumen was 
invested in the enterprise of collecting and editing 
the literature of the Old Testament, another warn- 
ing that we have here no supernatural message, but, 
at best, the earnest thoughts of many noble men 
jumbled together by the careless hands of other 
men, into a heap which has not yet been, and never 
can be perfectly assorted. 

The marginal date of Malachi is 397, B. c. It 
should be about 450. He stands for the exclusive 
tendency to which the book of Jonah was opposed. 
It is uncertain whether Malachi is a prophet’s name, 
or his title. It means the “ angel,” or “ Messenger” 
of Yahweh. There is no contemporary mention 
of any such prophet. He has not the old time in- 
spiration. The Jews considered him the last of the 
prophets. Apparently his prophecies were never 
spoken. He is significant as the first prophet who 
makes any mention of the Mosaic Law. 

If the dates that I have assigned to the different 
prophetic books are approximately true, the present 
order of their arrangement is hopelessly confusing 
and absurd. Arranged in chronological order, they 
would come in some such way as this: 1. Amos; 
2. Hosea ; 3. Zechariah IX. to XI.; 4. Isaiah ; 5. 
Micah; 6. Nahum; 7. Zephaniah ; 8. Joel; 9. Hab - 
bakuk ; 10. Zechariah , XII. to XIV.; 11. Obadiah ; 
12. Jeremiah, f except the closing chapters; 13. 

* Chap. XU : 6. flncluding Lamentations. 


28 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


Ezekiel : 14. the Dentero-Isaiah : the Great Un- 
known ; 15. Haggai ; 16. Zechariah , I. to VIII.; 

1 7. Malachi; 18. Jonah; 19. If to be ranked among 
the prophets, Daniel . 

But the phenomena of prophetism, as it appeared 
in Palestine from first to last, are not exhausted 
by the prophetic books which we have been con- 
sidering. These books, omitting Daniel , cover a 
period of three hundred and fifty years. But al- 
ready at the beginning of the eighth century, B. C., 
when Amos left his herds and sycamores to lift up 
his voice against the Northern Kingdom, prophetism 
had had a long career, and names full as illustrious 
as any from Amos to Malachi. Before considering 
this previous development, let us for a moment 
pause and ask ourselves what is the prevailing view 
of prophetism in the Christian world. Is it not that 
the prophets were all chips of the same block ; that 
their many voices made but one music ; that they 
all held the same views, and cherished the same 
hopes; that Jehovah was to all of them the same 
God, and the only God of all the universe ; that 
they were pure monotheists from first to last ; that 
they all accepted the same moral standards ; were 
all equal haters of idolatry in every form ; that they 
were inspired directly by the Deity to utter their 
predictions? But still more strikingly, is it not, the 
prevailing view of Christendom, that the chief and 
almost the only function of these prophets, was to 
predict the distant future, and especially the com- 
ing of the Messianic Kingdom, supposed to be 
identical with Christianity, and of the Messiah, sup- 
posed to be identical with Jesus Christ? 


THE PROPHETS . 


2 9 


I have said enough already, incidentally, to con- 
vince a candid hearer that this prevailing view of 
prophetism is not true of those prophets whose writ- 
ings have come down to us. Casually as we have 
considered them, does it not appear that there was 
much variety among them, much development from 
first to last ; that there was growth, and afterwards 
decline of form and spirit ; that their concern was 
always with the near future, never with the remote; 
that all of their predictions had reference to the 
Jewish religion and the Jewish state, and their im- 
mediate relations to the religions and the nations 
round about, not to a religion in the distant future 
which should array itself against their own with 
persecuting hands? But all of this, and more, will 
straightway appear more clearly if we attempt to 
trace the phenomena of prophetism from their be- 
ginning, long before the time of Amos, to their 
close, in the fifth century, B. c. 

Hebrew prophecy, strictly speaking, dates from 
the time of Samuel, the eleventh century, B. c. The 
Hebrew word generally used for a prophet is nabi , 
which means one inspired, possessed by some deity. 
The Hebrews borrowed many things from the Ca- 
naanites, very naturally, for they were a much more 
highly civilized and cultivated people than them- 
selves. One of the things they borrowed, it would 
seem, was prophecy. At any rate the Canaanites 
had their prophets quite as much as the Hebrews, 
prophets of Baal and Ashera, and other deities^ 
The earliest meaning of “ false prophets,” of whorh 
we hear so much in the Old Testament, was proph - 


30 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


ets not inspired by Yahweh. Afterwards it came to 
mean prophets favoring the idolatrous worship of 
Yahweh, or prophets who did not insist on the im- 
portance of righteousness to the true worship of 
Yahweh, and finally Jeremiah treats as false proph- 
ets such as Habbakuk and the author of Zechariah, 
XII. — XIV., because they took a less gloomy view 
than he of the prospective sufferings of Judah. 

The prophets of Baal went in herds ; so did the 
prophets of Yahweh. The most of them were young 
men, enthusiastic and fanatical. They had commu- 
nities by themselves — schools of the prophets. They 
stirred up the prophetic spirit in themselves with 
music and other artificial means. Samuel took these 
communities in hand. He gave direction to their 
energy. He infused into them a passionate rever- 
ence for Yahweh, and attachment to his cause. He 
is himself called a prophet, and so, for that matter, 
is Moses, and Deborah, whose famous song you 
know, is called a prophetess. But these designa- 
tions are all after-thoughts. Samuel was a seer, 
that is a soothsayer, and there were plenty of other 
soothsayers before and after him. But their fortune- 
telling had no necessary connection with religion. 
But prophetism was religious through and through. 
It allied itself with soothsaying. The seers became 
prophets. Indeed soothsaying was one of the signs 
of a false prophet in the times of Amos and Hosea. 
But it was not in the ninth and tenth centuries be- 
fore Christ. The prophets of Samuel’s time were 
very different from Amos and Hosea. They were 
not monotheists any more than David and Solomon, 


THE PROPHETS. 


31 


though they did not, like David, worship other gods, 
or like Solomon tolerate all manner of idolatry and 
licentiousness, under the cover of religion. They 
did not deny the existence of other gods than Yah- 
weh. But Yahweh was their God. Yet he, again, 
was very different from the Yahweh of Micah and 
Isaiah. The name was the same, but it stood for 
an entirely different conception of the deity. Be- 
ginning. in nature-worship, and in awe and terror of 
the darker and fiercer aspects of nature, the religion 
of Israel did not shake off for centuries the spell of 
early associations. Their God was “ a consuming 
fire a cruel God, and as such to be worshipped 
with cruel human sacrifices. The Canaanitish Mo- 
loch (more properly Molech) was his nearest blood 
relation. When Samuel “ hewed Agag in pieces 
before Yahweh in Gilgal,” he made a human sacri- 
fice. So did David when he put to death seven of 
Saul’s sons to appease the wrath of Yahweh. This 
act, which is so shocking to our sensibilities, was an 
act of piety. But if such men as Samuel and David 
had such a conception of Yahweh, what must have 
been the popular conception ? Associated with the 
worship of Yahweh was the worship of Ashera. Her 
symbols, the cisheras ,* were set up on every hill by 
the side of the altars of Yahweh. Her worship was 
licentiousness. Yahweh himself was worshipped in 
the shape of a young bull. In the Northern King- 
dom this worship continued till the fall of that 
kingdom. It was the worship of no other deity, as 

* Translated groves in English Bibles. They were tree-stems : 
phallic emblems. 


32 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

we have been always taught. It was the worship 
of Yahweh. “ Thy God/’ says Jeroboam, speaking 
of his golden bull, “ which brought thee up out of 
the land of Egypt.” In the Southern Kingdom 
there was no bull in the temple, but the reminis- 
cences of bull worship were all about : “ the horns of 
the altar,” the great laver resting upon twelve oxen. 
Molech was worshipped under the same form, and 
thus again is his relationship with the Yahweh of 
the Hebrews attested. 

Such were the ideas of Yahweh which animated 
the early prophets, and such the worship they ac- 
corded him. We do not hear of the schools of the 
prophets for one hundred and fifty years after 
Samuel. Then they appear again in great vigor, 
especially in the Northern Kingdom. Elijah and 
Elisha were honored by these schools as “ fathers.” 
These prophets are commonly regarded as the spir- 
itual equals of Amos and Isaiah. And truly they 
were stalwart men, and saved the Northern King- 
dom from going over utterly to the worship of Baal. 
But their conception of Yahweh was very different 
from that of later times. We have reason to believe 
that they made no objection to the bull worship of 
Yahweh, but were entirely satisfied with it. They 
were not preachers, and still less writers like the 
later prophets; they were men of action. With 
their retainers they were a party in the state, a very 
powerful one, now pulling down one king or dy- 
nasty, and setting up another. Prophetism in the 
tenth century was organized tyrannicide. Did Eli- 
jah and Elisha believe in one God and no more ? 
Rather that Yahweh was the only God for Israel . 


THE PROPHETS. 


33 


For the ninth century we have but scanty records, 
but at the beginning of the eighth the prophetic 
office had become a means of livelihood. The 
schools had lost their hold upon the affections of 
the people, and had fallen into disrepute. A little 
later and we hear nothing more of them. How 
then ? Is prophetism dead ? Rather it is about 
to have a second birth, and to enjoy a new and 
higher life for full three centuries before again it 
falls into decay. We have now arrived at Amos, 
the first of the writing prophets whose prophecies 
have been preserved. At the very outset he makes 
his boast that he is no prophet, no son of a prophet. 
From henceforth prophetism is to be less clannish, 
and more individual. The great prophets of the 
eighth and seventh centuries are to stand by them- 
selves. They are to have kings and priests, and the 
majority of the prophets, all against them ; sometimes 
the people too. But all that is best in the religion 
of Israel is to be wrought out by these men. But 
for them it would be no more to us than the re- 
ligion of Phenicia or Babylon. Now it is infinitely 
more. The prophets of the eighth century are the 
first prophets who are strict monotheists. For them 
Yahweh is not one God of many ; he is the only 
God. “ The gods of the nations are idols.” They 
affirm this. They have no real existence. Corre- 
sponding to their images there is no reality. For 
them Yahweh is no longer a mere tribal God. He 
is the God of all the world ; the maker and sus- 
tainer of the universe, of whom no image must be 
made. But best of all he is a moral being. He is 


34 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


a holy God, and his best service is righteousness, 
This is the central thought of prophetism at its 
best: The Eternal loveth righteousness. Compared 
with this, sacrifices are an abomination in his sight. 
And this thought of theirs was no revival of any 
ancient Mosaism, though they were pleased to so 
consider it. We have been taught : The basis of 
prophetism was the Mosaic Law. But the first 
prophet who mentions the Mosaic Law is Malachi, 
the last of the prophets. In the eighth century 
there was no Mosaic Law in any modern sense. 
There were the “ ten words,” as they were then 
called, the ten commandments, as we call them, and 
a few precepts and traditions. But the Pentateuch 
in anything like its present form was still far in the 
future ; Deuteronomy more than one hundred years 
ahead ; Leviticus and Numbers' * nearly three hun- 
dred. Prophetism created Deuteronomy. It col- 
lected the legends. It wrote the histories.f It 
reflected back the light which it had won upon the 
past But the spiritual monotheism of the eighth 
century, B. C., was no tradition. It was an evolu- 
tion. It was a new discovery, a greater one than 
any that mankind had made before. 

These spiritual monotheists did not carry every- 
thing before them. Judah and Israel did not sud- 
denly abjure their idols and their immoralities. 
There were still prophets as well as people who be- 
lieved that Yahweh was best worshipped by sacri- 
fices and image worship and lascivious rites.J And 

* Mainly, with much of Genesis and Exodus . See third lecture. 

f Samuel and Kings ; not Chronicles. 

% Those of the Ashera closely connected with the worship of Je- 
hovah, if not a part of it . — Amos II., 7 ; Deut. XVI., 21 


THE PROPHETS . 


35 


not content with this, the kings and people still 
worshipped everywhere the gods of Moab and Phe- 
nicia, as they had always done. There was no back 
sliding to speak of. It is only made to appear so 
by the narrators of a later day. There was pretty 
steady progress all along. The people were not 
quite so bad as the prophets make them out. They 
thought their religion a great deal better than the 
religion of the prophets, and their way of worship- 
ping Yahweh the better way. Why not ? It was 
certainly the old way, and their religion was the old 
religion. 

It must be granted that there was a certain nar- 
rowness in prophetism, even at the best. Yahweh 
was the God of all the earth, but he had a peculiar 
relation to Israel. She was his chosen wife. He 
had no such love or care for any other people. 
Where did they get such an idea? That Yahweh 
was their tribal God to begin with does not fully 
account for it. Alas, what a satire upon it has been 
the history of Judaism for two and twenty hundred 
years 1 But could the prophets have foreseen it all, 
I doubt if they would have confessed themselves 
mistaken. Jeremiah certainly would not. He 
would say: We have deserved it for our sins. But 
he would hope for better things at last. Yahweh 
will not keep his anger forever. As time went on 
prophetism grew narrower in its conviction that 
Yahweh was peculiarly the God of Israel. Yet 
protestants arose, one of them the Dentero- 
Tsaiah ; another, as we have seen, the author of The 
Book o [Jonah, with a less exclusive, and a tenderer 
thought of God. 


3 6 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY. 


These men believed in a great future for Israel* 
but not in any future for the individual beyond the 
grave. 

“ The grave shall not praise thee Yahweh. 

The dead shall not celebrate thee. 

They that go down into the pit shall not hope fo* 
thy truth. 

The living, the living shall praise thee as . I do 
this day/* 

They were not politically wise. In state affairs 
they did not consult prudential motives but their 
religious principles. They would trust for safety to 
their obedience to the commandments of Yahweh. 
They would make no alliance with foreign peoples* 
In times of peace they would not prepare for war. 
Jeremiah exhorted his countrymen to submit to the 
Chaldeans. And when Josiah, faithfullest of all the 
servants of Yahweh, was killed in battle by Necho, 
of Egypt, great was the consternation and out of it 
came the awful questionings of the book of Job* 

The greatest of the Hebrew prophets were not 
laughing philosophers. They were the harshest of 
ascetics. They despised all wealth and art and 
luxury. How hard Isaiah was upon the women of 
Jerusalem. “ Because the daughters of Sion” he 
cried, “walk proudly with their necks stretched out, 
mincing their gait to make their anklets tinkle, 
Yahweh will make bald their heads and expose 
them in nakedness. Then will he wrench off these 
anklets, little suns and moons, ear-rings, armlets, 
veils and gauze, foot-bracelets, girdles and scent- 

*See Fourth Lecture. 


THE PROPHETS. 


37 


boxes, kerchiefs and mantles, pouches and shifts, 
turbans and tunics. There shall be rottenness in- 
stead of balsam, a rope for a girdle, baldness for 
plaited hair, sack-cloth for a mantle, and bruises fo»* 
beauty.” Perhaps the right was somewhere be- 
tween these daughters of Sion and the prophet. 
They may have overdone it, but perhaps they were 
a little nearer right than he. 

But what about the wonderful predictions by these 
prophets of events in the far distant future ? They 
made no such predictions. They pretended to 
make none such.* The idea that they did grew up 
long after they had ceased from all their labors. 
They were not sooth-sayers but preachers of right- ! 
eousness. They did make predictions. But they 
were all conditional. And they all had reference to / 
an immediate future, to calamities already impend- 
ing ; to a deliverance that would not be long de- 
layed. Captivity and desolation were to be the 
punishment of sin ; peace and prosperity the re- 
ward of righteousness. Of their predictions some 
of the more general were fulfilled. The most were 
doomed to utter disappointment. 

It is the creed of Christendom that the special 
function of the prophets was to predict the Mes- 
sianic Kingdom and its King; Christianity and 
Jesus from the Christian stand-point. But so far 
were predictions on this head from constituting 
a preponderating part of prophecy that several 
prophets do not mention them at all. Those 

* The test of a true prophet given in Deuteronomy is that the event 
shall correspond with his prediction. If the event was ever in the 
distant future the futility of such a test is obvious. 


38 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


that do have each his individual conception. Dis- 
tance had lent enchantment to the view of 
David’s reign. Freely idealized it came to be the 
typical anticipation of “the good time coming.’ 
The conviction that such a time was coming only 
grew more intense with every added disappointment. 
A king* of the house of David should reign over 
Ephraim and Judah once again united. But in the 
Deutero-Isaiah there is a very different concep- 
tion. There is no mention of a personal Messiah. 
David’s line had sunk too low for any good thing to 
come out of it. Yahweh shall be glorified in his 
“ Servant,” by whom, as I have said, no person is 
intended but the faithful and righteous from among 
the people. These will bear the sins of all the rest. 
They will be wounded for their transgressions and 
bruised for their iniquities. Then shall the glory 
of Israel be restored and she shall have dominion 
over the heathen. Ay, more ! These shall hear of 
Yahweh and shall worship him as their God. Here 
was another protest against the habitual narrowness 
of the prophetic expectation. Here was the most 
beautiful expression of the impersonal Messianic 
hope. 

I need not tell you that this hope has not been 
realized. Certainly there was no fulfilment of it 
in Christianity. The nations do not worship Yah- 
weh and Israel has not dominion over them. The 
so-called Messianic passages in the New Testament 
are seldom Messianic in their Old Testament mean- 
ing and those that are do not apply to anything 

* Nowhere in the Old Testament called the Messiah. 


THE PROPHETS . 


39 


concerning Jesus save in some petty, verbal way. 
And yet there was a very real sense in which the 
prophets prophesied of Jesus and his new religion. 
Their central word was this : The Eternal loveth 
righteousness. And what was his ? Righteousness 
tendeth unto life* Essentially the same but with 
an accent of diviner pity and more holy trust. 
They prophesied of him as the first streaks of morn- 
ing prophesy the coming day. 

The exposition of prophecy which I have now 
concluded is no whim of mine ; no notion of some 
radical iconoclast. It is a result wrought out by the 
most patient scholarship of the most gifted men. 
It has taken a long time to perfect it so far. Men 
have labored and other men have entered into their 
labors. I am conscious of the incompleteness of my 
exposition though I have kept you long. How hap- 
py I should be if I could feel that my instruction 
has rewarded your attention half so well as it de- 
serves. 

* See Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma . 


SECOND LECTURE. 


THE HISTORIES. 

The best historical material of the Old Testament 
is that which is not avowedly historical, “ The 
Prophets/’ which I considered in my last lecture ; 
“The Writings,” which I shall consider in my next 
but one. In and between the lines of these books 
— The Prophets and The Writings — we have our 
only contemporary history. The avowed histories 
were written for the most part hundreds of years 
after the events which they narrate. The Prophets 
and the Writings let us into the very heart of the 
times when they were written. It is only incident- 
ally that they make mention of political events. 
But the history of Israel is much more interesting 
and important considered as a history of thought 
than as a history of political events. And the 
Prophets and the Psalms, and other writings inform 
us perfectly what their authors thought. From the 
predictions of national disaster we can learn what 
dangers were imminent * y from the immoralities and 
the idolatries denounced, what immoralities and 
idolatries were prevalent at certain times. In draw- 
ing out from the Old Testament the history of the 
Hebrews and the Jews (the former word applies to 
the pre-exilic, the latter to the post-exilic nation) 
the Prophets are of the first importance. The only 


THE HISTORIES. 


41 


safe method is to start from them, and in a less 
degree from the Writings, and then cautiously work 
our way backward over the ground covered by the 
avowed histories of the Peyitateuch and the books 
immediately succeeding. These in their turn prove 
to be exceedingly valuable as historical material, 
once we discover their true age and character. 
Those parts of them which are worth least as his- 
tories of early times are worth a great deal as un- 
conscious testimony to the religious tendencies of 
the times when they appeared. But nothing could 
be more dangerously misleading than to take the 
apparent histories of the Old Testament as they 
stand and use them as veritable histories. A very 
little investigation proves that they were not origin- 
ally written as histories but as didactic composi- 
tions ; that the history is mainly incidental to the 
moral purpose, a vehicle for the conveyance of cer- 
tain doctrines and ideas priestly or prophetic. 

There is a hint of this, as of much else that is 
important, in the Jewish arrangement of the Old 
Testament books, an arrangement, as I showed in 
my last lecture, vastly more instructive than our 
own. In their arrangement there was and is noth- 
ing which is set up as history. The Pentateuch , 
originally including Joshua, was called the Law — 
Thorah ; the Prophets — Nebiim — included the His- 
tories of Judges , Samuel, Kings as the early prophets ; 
all of the Prophets except Daniel that I considered 
in my last lecture, and originally such of the Psalms 
as had appeared up to the middle of the fifth cen- 
tury, B. C., while all the rest of the Old Testament, 


42 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


including ultimately the Psalms, was called the 
Writings, Ketubim. Now in the designation of the 
books of Judges, Samuel and Kings as early proph- 
ets, there was involved a really critical perception 
of their character, for it is not likely that this desig- 
nation was applied because the books in question 
contained accounts of the early prophets, but rather 
because they were seen to be prophetic in their 
spirit and their aim. We shall discover that the 
contributions of the prophets to the Old Testament 
are by no means included in the prophetical books 
which we have already investigated, but that they 
had a hand in much beside ; that the Pentateuch is 
of their making to a considerable extent ; the books 
of Joshua and Judges and Samuel and Kings to a 
much greater; the Psalms so largely as to justify 
their original inclusion with the prophets by the 
Jewish canonists.* 

*The contents of the Old Testament admit of a pretty complete 
classification under three heads, Prophetic, Priestly, and Sophistic in 
the better sense : the writings of the wise men, or the sages, an im- 
portant element, as we shall see, but in quantity much less than 
either the Priestly or Prophetic. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are its 
most conspicuous factors. The Priestly element includes Chronicles 
and Ezra and Nehemiah, many of the Psalms , and the Levitical 
portions of the Pentateuch , which are considerable, the most of 
Numbers and Leviticus , and a good deal besides. In quantity as 
well as quality the Prophetic element largely predominates over not 
only the Sophistic, but also the Priestly. It includes all of the so- 
called prophets, considerable portions of the Pentateuch , especially 
the accounts of patriarchal times, the most of Joshua and Judges , of 
Samuel and Kings , and many of the Psalms , the best ones always. 
But it must be allowed that there are books which do not easily fall 
into either of these three classes. Daniel is a cross between a proph- 
etic and apocalyptic writing ; Ezekiel a cross between priestly and 
prophetic ; Deuteronomy another and much more remarkable ; Job a 
cross between sophistic and prophetic, while The Song oj Songs, 
though often classed with the sophistic, is really sui generis. Its 
style is absolutely unique. 


THE HISTORIES. 


43 


Of the Pentateuch as “ The Book of the Law,” I 
shall speak exclusively in my next lecture. But 
the legal element in it is embedded in a continuous 
historical narrative. Let me then, seeing that I de- 
sire before completing this lecture to give a sum- 
mary of the political and religious history of Israel 
throughout the entire course of its development 
until the extinction of the Jewish state — let me 
state, in brief, a few things about the composition 
of the Pentateuch , which I shall more completely 
explain and develop in my next lecture. It is diffi- 
cult to believe that less than twenty years ago the 
denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch , 
by Bishop Colenso, roused such a storm of indigna- 
tion as threatened to cost the good bishop his posi- 
tion in the English church, for at the present time 
Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, holds his posi- 
tion in the church, one of the proudest too, with 
absolute security while frankly publishing opinions 
far more radical than Colenso’s. Moreover he has 
the scholarship of the church almost entirely on his 
side, and hundreds of the lower clergy. But here 
in America, so far as I can judge, the Mosaic au- 
thorship of the Pentateuch is commonly assumed in 
all the Evangelical churches. A history purporting 
to begin with the beginning of the world, 4004, B. C., 
and to end in 1451, shortly after the death of Moses, 
whose death it piously records, — all this is sup- 
posed to have been written by the hand of Moses, 
and to be a faithful and consistent account of things 
which really happened, and words which were really 
spoken by the persons or the deity to whom they 


44 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


are ascribed. If it were so we should still have a 
history written at a distance, in many instances, of 
from five to five-and-twenty hundred years from 
the events recorded. To such a history a theory of 
supernatural inspiration is absolutely necessary if 
it is going to have any authority whatever. But 
the theory of supernatural inspiration, as well as 
the theory of Mosaic authorship, was never started 
till ten or a dozen centuries after the death of Moses. 
The theory of Mosaic authorship was part of a gen- 
eral system, which just before the beginning of the 
Christian era ascribed the Old Testament books to 
those persons who figured in them most conspicu- 
ously, for example, the book of Joshua to Joshua, 
the books of Samuel to Samuel. But this conclu- 
sion of the Talmudists, ever the most uncritical of 
men, was without any critical justification what- 
soever. There is not a sign that the book of Joshua 
was written by Joshua, or the books of Samuel by 
Samuel, or the five books of the Pentateuch by 
Moses. The Pentateuch is not, if you will permit 
me to say so, Mosaic, but it is a Mosaic . Perhaps 
a patchwork would be a still correcter designation ; 
a patchwork too, in many parts, of the sort called 
harlequin, so incongruous are the materials that are 
arbitrarily joined together. So far was the compo- 
sition of the Pentateuch from being contemporaneous 
with even the latest events which it narrates, that 
the oldest fragment of any size which it contains 
dates from the ninth century, B. C., that is to say, 
five hundred and fifty years after the events, if we 
accepted the Old Testament chronology, three hun- 


THE HISTORIES. 


45 


dred and eighty on a more rational system. The 
gap between this fragment and the patriarchal times 
is about a thousand years. This fragment, which 
the critics have agreed to call the Book of Covenants , 
extends from Exodus XXI., to XXIII., 19. The next 
considerable portion of the Pentateuch was probably 
written about 750, B. c., a dozen centuries and more 
from the events to which it gives the most atten- 
tion. These are the events of patriarchal times. 
In this document appear the patriarchal stories in 
their most charming form. The writer’s standpoint 
is prophetic, and the critics sometimes call him the 
prophetic narrator, and sometimes the Jehovist or 
Javehist, because he uses the name Yahweh in 
speaking of the earliest times, where another prin- 
cipal writer is very careful not to. The Book of 
Covenants is included in this document, and also 
(according to some critics) another very consider- 
able one is amalgamated with it, the author of which 
is sometimes called the older Elohist f because he 
uses the word Elohim for God, where the great 
prophetic narrator uses Yahveh. But in other re- 
spects he is more like the Jehovist than like the 
great Elohist of the Book of Origins ,* for his stand- 
point also is prophetic, while that of the great Elo- 
hist is thoroughly levitical. Here then we have 
already three considerable documents included in 
the Pentateuch , but as yet it had not attained to 

*“ The junior Elohist” of Davidson, the author of the Book of 
Origins being his older Elohist. Ewald calls him “ the first prophetic 
narrator” or “the third principal narrator.” Kuenen ignores him 
altogether. 

* See Lecture III. for full account of this title. 


46 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


half its present bulk. The next great addition was 
made in the time of King Josiah. This was the 
book of Deuteronomy. It was made public in 621, 
B. c., and had been written just before, six hundred 
and fifty years after the death of Moses. Soon after 
it was incorporated with those parts of the Penta- 
teuch which had been previously written — the Book 
of Covenants and the two prophetic narrations. The 
standpoint of the writer is priestly-prophetic. The 
priests and prophets had often been opposed to 
each other. But here was a man who believed 
heartily in both parties, and his book is a sort of 
compromise between them. His is the fragment of 
the Pentateuch which shows the most individual 
genius. He is another Great Unknown. 

For a long time after the modern date of Deuter- 
onomy was established to the satisfaction of the 
ablest critics, it was supposed to be the latest frag- 
ment of the Pentateuch. After the Deuteronomist 
there was supposed to have been only a redactor of 
the whole. But it is much more likely that at the 
time when Deuteronomy appeared the most influ- 
ential and characteristic portion of the Pentateuch 
was still unwritten, namely, the great Elohistic 
document, so called because it is very careful to 
speak of God only as Elohim up to the time of 
Moses. Ewald and others after him call it also the 
Book of Origins. The date of this document is a 
matter of fundamental -importance in dealing not 
only with the Pentateuch , but with the religious 
history of the people of Israel. Ths date of Kuenen, 
about 450 B. c., it seems to me, rests upon abso. 


THE HISTORIES. 


4 7 


lutely irrefragable foundations. This Elohistic doc- 
ument, or Book of Origins , contains the bulk of 
Numbers and Leviticus , together with considerable 
parts of Genesis and Exodus . Therefore it contains 
the whole of what for centuries has been regarded 
as preeminently the Mosaic Law, and it proves to 
have been written at least eight hundred years after 
the death of Moses. A wonderful conclusion, but 
one which is the key to many a mystery before in- 
soluble ! 

The Pentateuch was now well nigh complete. 
After the fifth century, B. C., only a few more 
levitical precepts were added, and the whole by 
processes of elimination and addition made to ap- 
pear somewhat more congruous. The fourth cen- 
tury, B. c., beyond a doubt beheld it in its present 
form. 

If the account which I have given of the forma- 
tion of the Pentateuch is even tolerably correct, it 
is certainly a very different matter from the imag- 
inary Pentateuch of our popular Christianity, which 
is a book made by Moses at one cast 1450 B. C.' x * 
Instead of this we have here a book made up of 
fragments, arbitrarily forced together, which frag- 
ments made their appearance all the way along from 
900 to 450, B. C., one of the most considerable of all 
being the latest. At the same time it ought to be 
remembered that none of the fragments we have 
spoken of were “ made out of the whole cloth.” 
There was a great stock of oral traditions to draw 

* The Biblical date of Moses’ death. The date of scientific criti- 
cism is 1280 b. c. 


48 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


upon, and also various books, the names of which, 
in a few cases, have been preserved to us, as, for 
example, the book of Jasher* and the Book of the 
wars of Yahweh . f But even the earliest of these was 
ante-dated a long time by the events reported, and 
they are only quoted in the most fragmentary man- 
ner. In short the Pe 7 itateucli was not a manufac- 
ture, but a growth, a growth of many centuries.^ 
“ To that collection,” says Matthew Arnold, “ many 
an old book had given up its treasures, and then itself 
vanished forever. Many voices were blended there 
— unknown voices, speaking out of the early dawn. 
In the strain there were many passages familiar as 
household words, yet the whole strain, in its con- 
tinuity and connection, was to the mass of the 
people [at the time of its completion] new and 
affecting.” The value of such a book as this as 
history is greater than at first appears. But its 
value is not that of direct statement, but of indirect 
testimony. Its value in the way of direct state- 
ment is almost inappreciable. Its accounts of primi- 
tive times must be taken not merely cum grano sails. 
They must be almost totally rejected. From all 
the patriarchal stories only a few cautious infer- 
ences can be drawn. These stories remain as beau- 
tiful as ever, as stories, but as history, or as bio- 
graphy, they are of no account. Whether there 
ever was an individual Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, 

* Numbers XXI., 14. 

f Joshua X., 13. 

f Especially the so-called documents of the older Elohist and 
Yahwehist were less documents than groups of legends developed 
around different centres of prophetic enthusiasm. 


THE HISTORIES . 


49 


is a very doubtful matter. The secret is let out in 
twenty different ways that these are representative 
names of tribes. “ Esau, that is Edom,” we read. 
Jacob’s little Benjamin, whom he cannot bear to 
part with, proves to be seventy years of age, and to 
have ten children. In short the patriarchal family 
relations are a crude philosophy of the relations of 
the Israelites to the adjacent tribes. Closely re 
lated to the Edomites, they accounted for this rela 
lation by deriving themselves and the Edomites 
from two brothers, Esau, or Edom, and Jacob. 
Esau’s seniority points to the fact that Edom was 
a civilized settled nation, while the Israelites were 
still nomadic. The story of the stolen birth-right 
was an attempt to show that Israel, spite of its 
juniority, was the superior nation. Again, less 
closely related to the Ishmaelites than to the 
Edomites, this relation was indicated by making 
Isaac, the father of Jacob, the son of Abraham, by 
his lawful wife, Ishmael the son of his unlawful 
concubine. Still less closely related to the Midian- 
ites and Dedanites, this relation was represented 
by making these descend from Keturah, a slave of 
Abraham. Rightly divining that they belonged to 
the same great family with the Ammonites and 
Moabites, the Israelites symbolized their relation 
to these tribes by making Lot, a nephew of Abra- 
ham, their progenitor. If you will study carefully 
the patriarchal genealogies, you will find that they 
are almost always easily explicable upon this theory, 
and senseless upon any other. 

The chances are, however, that before Abraham, 


50 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


Isaac and Jacob were employed as tribal represen- 
tatives, they had already done double service, first 
as factors in a primitive solar mythology, and after- 
wards as factors in the myths of agriculture and 
civilization.* And not these alone, but many other 
Pentateuch ancestors and heroes and celebrities. 
When we read that Enoch was 365 years old, when 
“ he was not, for God took him," we see plainly 
that the original Enoch was a solar year, the 365 
years of his life its 365 days. With almost equal 
plainness, we see that in the myth of Cain and Abel 
Cain is the agriculturist and Abel the nomad, and 
the myth embodies the enmity always existing 
between the nomads and the agriculturists. But 
before Cain and Abel figured in this myth of civiliza- 
tion they had impersonated, as their names indirectly 
imply, the day and night respectively in a solar 
myth. There are not wanting signs that the principal 
patriarchs were fairly on the road to deification when 
this tendency was arrested by a variety of circum- 
stances, and they became heroic ancestors instead 
of gods. But their arrival at the dignity of heroic 
ancestors did not complete the round of their de- 
velopment. As monotheism gradually arose, the 
hero ancestors became pious servants of Yahweh. 
Religious sentiments were freely attributed to them 
which it had taken centuries of sad experience to 
develop. As they have come down to us, the patri- 
archal stories are a palimpsest on which a legend of 
civilization is written over a solar myth, and a tribal 
legend over the legend of civilization, and a theo- 

* For this whole matter see Goldziher’s Hebrew Mythology. What 
I assume is allowed by many of his critics, even the most unfriendly 


THE HISTORIES. 


51 


cratic legend over the tribal. The first are very dim, 
so dim that average eyes can hardly be expected 
to discover them, but patient scholars, with their 
critical acids, have made some things legible enough. 

And now let us proceed to consider the other 
historical books of the Old Testament, and then 
returning to the Pentateuch , take up the thread of 
history at the earliest possible date, and follow it 
until the cycle of Israel’s fortunes was completed in 
the first century of the Christian era. 

First in order after the Pentateuch comes the book 
of Joshua. At the first formation of the Jewish 
canon, it was included with the five books of the 
Pentateuch , as a part of the Law. This was a very 
natural arrangement. If it was necessary to have 
a Pentateuch , that is a five-fold book, it would have 
been better to leave off Genesis from the beginning, 
than Joshua from the end. The four remaining 
books are much completer without Genesis than 
without Joshua. Moreover, we have reason to be- 
lieve that the same hands that shaped the principal 
documents of the Pentateuch , shaped the two prin- 
cipal fragments of the book of Joshua. These are, 
1. Chapters I. to XIII.; 2. Chapters XIV. to XXIV. 
The book is naturally divided into these two sec- 
tions. The first recites the story of Joshua’s con- 
quest of Canaan ; the second his division of the 
land among the tribes. The first is mainly from 
the Deuteronomist, who makes use of older material 
of the Pentateuch Yahwehist ; the second is mainly 
by the Elohist.* But there are Yahwehistic frag- 

* So I shall designate the later Elohist, the author of the Book of 
Origins. 


52 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


merits in the second part, and Elohistic in the first. 
The marginal dates of the book are from 1451 to 
1427. Talmudic legend ascribed the book in its 
entirety to Joshua, and Christian superstition has 
endorsed the notion of the Rabbis. Certainly 
Joshua could write an account of his own death 
as well as Moses. The actual date of the conquest, 
however, and of Joshua’s leadership, was not that 
of the Bible margins, but one hundred and seventy- 
one years later, from about 1280, B.'c., onward. But 
the composition of the book by Joshua at this date 
is hardly less impossible than at the earlier, a cen- 
tury and more before his birth. The book was 
written mainly by the Deuteronomist soon after 
Deuteronomy (say about 620,- B. C.), and by the Elo- 
hist after the captivity, about 450, B. C. 

In a book written so long after the events which 
it records, from six to eight hundred years, we 
should not expect to find accurate history. A year 
then was just as long as a year now, and people’s 
memories were just as treacherous, and their ideal- 
izing tendencies just as active. But it may be said 
that in our day the best histories are the latest, for 
example, Green’s History of the English People, 
and Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest. 
True enough, but the superior value of these his- 
tories is based upon their critical use of contem- 
porary documents. But the authors of Joshua had, 
in the first place, no contemporary documents, no 
memoirs poiw servir that came within centuries of 
the events, but, worse than this, they had no taste 
sr aptitude for critical investigation. Whatever 


THE HISTORIES . 


53 


glorified Israel or Yahweh, by that sign was true 
enough for them. They were not in search ol 
truth. They had a thesis to maintain. Their writ- 
ings were what the Germans call tendency writings ; 
that is, they were written to carry a point, and the 
writers saw everything through the distorting me- 
dium of their predisposition to believe that certain 
things were true. The Deuteronomist wanted the 
sanction of antiquity for his priestly-prophetic com- 
promise, and for his passionate exclusiveness, and 
for his centralized worship at Jerusalem. The Elo- 
hist wanted the sanction of antiquity for his levitical 
enthusiasm. Understand this, and you understand 
the book of Joshua . 

The book of Judges , which comes next after the 
book of Joshua , is the best commentary upon it, 
the best corrective of its unhistorical assumptions. 
Not but that there are embedded in Joshua , here 
and there, bits of tradition which are wholly at 
variance with the average tenor of the book. But 
Judges is a wonderful treasury of almost contem- 
porary traditions of the period between the con- 
quest and the time of David, from about 1280 or 
1270 to 1050, or thereabout. According to Joshua 
the ten tribes acted in perfect unity, subjugated 
Canaan entirely in one year, and divided its terri- 
tory among the tribes. From the traditional stories 
of the book of Judges we learn that the conquest 
was a very gradual affair, requiring centuries instead 
of months for its completion, and that the tribes, 
instead of acting as a united nation, were always 
more or less divided. Single tribes did the most of 


54 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


the fighting ; sometimes two or three were banded 
together for an immediate object. Sometimes they 
waged bitter war upon each other. Sometimes 
they were subjected to the Canaanitish tribes. A 
great deal of pious ingenuity has been wasted on the 
extermination of the Canaanites by the Israelites. 
There was no such extermination. No doubt the 
tender mercies of the Israelites were cruel, for they 
were barbarians, and they were Semites. But their 
extermination of the Canaanites was an imagination 
of the Deuteronomist, who wanted such a precedent 
to justify his own exclusiveness. And as there was 
never any such conquest as that of Joshua I. to 
XIII., so was there never any such division of the 
territory as that of Joshua XIV. to XXII. This was 
a prophecy after the event. A division which it 
had taken centuries to establish was attributed to 
Joshua, in order, mainly, that the claims of the 
priests and levites of the fifth century, B. C., might 
seem to have the sanction of antiquity. 

As historic material the book of Judges is one of 
the most valuable sections of the Old Testament. 
But a sharp distinction is to be made between the 
final author or editor of it, and the legends which he 
incorporates in it, some of which are actually con- 
temporary with the events. For Judges also is a 
tendency writing. It has a thesis to maintain, viz : 
that faithfulness to Yahweh is the only means of 
victory in war or national prosperity. This was the 
stand-point of the prophets, of whom the final edi- 
tor of Judges was certainly one, a monotheist who 
reflected back his monotheism upon times when 


THE HISTORIES. 


55 


there was no such thing as monotheism ; at best only 
monolatry — the exclusive worship of one God, while 
allowing the existence of many others. He repre- 
sents the divisions of the Israelites and their subjec- 
tion by their Canaanitish neighbors as resulting 
from their lapse from the pure monotheism which 
Moses had revealed to them, the fact being that he 
revealed no such monotheism, and that there was no 
such national unity as the writer imagines, at the 
time of the conquest. The traditions which he in- 
nocently admits into his book, and which make up 
the bulk of it, sufficiently confute his darling theo- 
ries. His time was certainly no earlier than the 
seventh century, B. c. When he wrote the northern 
tribes had already gone into captivity. * 

The traditions embedded in his argument, — for 
argument it is — are exceedingly instructive. They 
show us how little unity there was among the 
tribes ; how much jealousy and rivalry. The ma- 
jority of the legends recite the exploits of the so- 
called Judges. But the function of these men was 
not judicial as our modern fancy pictures it, nor did 
any of them judge all Israel. Their function was 
that of military leadership, generally of one, some- 
times of two or more tribes. The chronology of our 
English Bible is based upon the idea that they were 
none of them contemporaneous, and so the periods 
of their separate leadership are all added together 
making about four hundred years in all. But we are 
tolerably certain of the date of the invasion and also 
of the beginning of David’s reign. Between the 
* Judges XVIII ; 30. 


56 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


two, we have only a little more than two centuries 
left for the entire period of the Judges including the 
times of Joshua and Samuel. These were the cen- 
turies of anarchy and chaos, but of inchoate national 
life. Out of the anarchy and division came the felt 
need of national union and a centralized govern- 
ment. 

Fourteen Judges are named in the book of Judges 
but there are copious accounts of only six. The 
legends of Gideon and Deborah and Samson, are the 
best of all — fountains of poetry that never cease to 
flow with infinite suggestion. From Milton’s glori- 
ous “ Samson Agonistes,” a cry out of the depths 
of his own night of blindness, to Longfellow’s “ Warn- 
ing,” how often has the blinded giant typified the 
cruelly oppressed, who yet shall overthrow the 
might of their oppressors. It was from the tragedy 
of Milton that George Eliot borrowed the concluding 
words of Daniel Deronda, words which might be 
the truthful epitaph of men and women whom you 
and I have personally known and loved. 

“ Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt. 

Dispraise or blame, nothing but well and fair 
And what may quiet us in a death so noble." 

Will the story of Samson be any less suggestive 
to the poet, when he is told that his place among 
the Judges is an extremely doubtful one? He is 
nowhere represented as exercising military leader- 
ership, the characteristic function of the Judges. In 
fact, his story proves to be a solar myth, the name 
Samson signifying “ the sun-god,” and many of the 


THE HISTORIES. 


5 7 


details of his story easily admitting of a mythologi- 
cal explanation. So evident is this, that it was the- 
story of Samson which first suggested to Steinthal* 
and other critics, the existence of an underlying 
stratum of solar myth in the Old Testament histor- 
ies. As the story has come down to us, it has been 
amalgamated with the story of some Danite hero. In 
the course of development sometimes the mythical 
name absorbed the lineaments of some actual hero, 
and sometimes the name of some actual hero ab- 
sorbed the lineaments of the solar myth. 

The Song of Deborah, one of the Judges of Israel, 
is one of the most valuable of contemporary frag- 
ments. And it is one of the most ancient fragments 
anywhere embedded in the Old Testament. It is 
wonderfully strong and beautiful, but its strength is 
the strength of a barbaric time and its beauty is the 
beauty of the tigress tasting upon her thick and sen- 
suous lips the blood of recent ravening. 

Next after Judges we have the book of Ruth . 
One of the smallest books in the Old Testament, it 
is one of the most precious. It is the idyl of the 
Old Testament. It forms a natural link between 
Judges and Samuel, and in the Septuagint it is ar- 
ranged as a continuation of the former, without any 
separate title. But the fact that it was originally 
among the “ writings ” in the Jewish Canon suggests 
a later origin, and its contents mark it plainly as the 
outcome of an entirely different spirit. The book of 
Judges is theocratic and prophetic in its spirit. The 
book of Ruth is not. It is the story of Ruth, a Moabi- 

* Goldziher’s Hebrew Mythology , p. 392. 


58 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


tish woman, a model of filial devotion, who by her 
marriage with Boaz becomes the ancestress of David. 
This is another tendency writing. A story written with 
a purpose ; this purpose to confute the narrowness of 
the Ezra-Nehemiah school with their hard exclusive- 
ness, their opposition to all foreign marriages. If a 
marriage with a foreign woman had been blessed by 
such a child as David in the third generation, a 
foreign marriage couldn’t be the heinous sin that 
Ezra represented it. Such is the argument which the 
author of Ruth clothes in idyllic language and sends 
forth upon its mission of good will. Its date is 
therefore easily determined. It must have been 
subsequent to Ezra, somewhere about 400 B.C. 

The first and second books of Samuel were reck- 
oned as one book in the Jewish Canon, and classed 
among the Early Prophets. For the Talmudic 
notion that it was the work of Samuel there is no 
justification, except, perhaps, that it recites in such a 
case the circumstances of the author’s death, as do 
also the Pentateuch and Joshua, supposing these 
books to have been written by Moses and Joshua. 
It is not likely that these books attained their pres- 
ent form till just before or soon after the beginning 
of the captivity, about four hundred years after the 
death of Samuel. The object of the writer was to 
glorify Samuel and David at the expense of Saul. 
He made use of various legends, written and oral, 
and joined them together in a very crude and blund- 
ering fashion. The books abound in contradictions 
and repetitions. Some of the fragments incorpora- 
ted in them, such, for example, as David’s lament 


THE HISTORIES . . 


59 


for Saul and Jonathan, are full of sentiment and life. 
Others are much inferior. The text of Samuel is 
more “ corrupt ” than that of any other book ; that I 
is to say, more mistakes have occurred in the tran- j 
scription of manuscripts and more liberties have been 
taken by the transcribers. Davidson marshals hun- 
dreds of absurdities or contradictions that have oc- 
curred in one or the other of these ways. But 1 
through this haze of doubt and contradiction we 
distinguish the impressive forms of Samuel, Saul 
and David ; we see the growing dawn of Hebrew 
nationality, and we see, in spite of the final author’s 
predilections, that not to Samuel or David, but 
to Saul belongs such credit as inheres in that 
event. But if to Saul belongs the credit of 
national union, to Samuel who opposed this 
union belongs the credit of reviving the worship 
of Yahweh. Apparently no monotheist , and conceiv- 
ing of Yahweh as a God delighting in the blood of 
human sacrifice, he was a strict monolatrist , insisting 
that to Yahweh Israel must pay exclusive homage. 

A very different person from the Samuel of the 
Sunday-school books and the popular theology, ec- 
clesiastical forerunner of the headstrong Hilde- 
brands, Bernards, and Beckets of the Christian era, 
he had a work to do and did it wonderfully well. 
For all the writer’s good intentions the David of the 
books of Samuel is not the David of the Psalms , as 
we shall see more clearly in due time. * He is a 
man of cruelty, and treachery, and lust ; a man after 


♦Fourth Lecture. 


6o 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY. 


Yahweh's own heart, as he conceives Yahweh, a god 
to whom he sacrifices the seven sons of Saul. Yah- 
weh was a god after his own heart, and that was 
the heart of a man who passed the Ammonites 
“ under saws and under harrows of iron, and under 
axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick- 
kiln,” — that is, burned them or roasted them to 
death. 

Next after the two books of Samuel we have the 
two books of Kings , which were the third and fourth 
books of Kings in early Christian times, before the 
first and second were yet called the books of SamueL 
In the Jewish Canon they brought up the rear of the 
Early Prophets. This designation proves to have 
been eminently fit when we consider the scope and 
spirit of the work. The prophetic manner is more 
strongly marked than in the books of Samuel \ 
though there also it is conspicuous. The books are 
written with a purpose : to show that only in the 
faithful service of Yahweh is there safety and suc- 
cess for kings and peoples. The sufferings of Israel 
and Judah are the merited punishments of their 
idolatry and disobedience. If the author was not 
himself a prophet, he must have lived in a circle of 
prophetic sympathies. For he sees everything from 
the prophetic standpoint. His history begins with 
the last years of David and his death (1018 B. C.) 
and continues until 562 B. C., about midway of the 
Captivity. Probably the work was finished soon 
after the later date. It was written in Babylon by 
one who was a captive there. The writer is an en- 
thusiast for the House of David, which he unconsci 


THE HISTORIES. 


6 1 


ously idealizes a good deal, depreciating at the same 
time the rival Kings of Israel. But of conscious 
tampering with his materials he is apparently never 
guilty. An honest man who likes to have the facts 
fall into line with his theories ; but if they do not he 
cannot help it. Honest, but not critical, and skep- 
tical of nothing that appears to favor his prophetic 
theory. Obedience to the prophets was with him 
synonymous with obedience to Yahweh. In com- 
piling his history he made use of many written 
sources and he sometimes stands corrected by the 
narratives which he incorporates into his own. But 
with the exception of the incidental history embod- 
ied in the Prophets, he is our only historian of Israel 
for 500 years who is at all trustworthy. And for 
the first 200, we have no contemporary witnesses to 
whom we can appeal. The books of Chronicles go 
over the same ground, but they pervert our knowl- 
edge more than they increase it. With the books 
of Kings ended the treatment of history from a pro- 
phetic standpoint. Ezekiel had already sounded 
the advance of a new order in which the priest 
should be everything, the prophet almost nothing. 
Acting upon this hint the unknown Elohist prepared 
the Book of Origins, a priestly reconstruction of the 
primitive histories. Written at Babylon this recon- 
struction made its appearance in Jerusalem on the 
return of Ezra, midway of the fifth century, B. c. 
But as yet there was no priestly reconstruction of 
the history from Saul to the captivity. Here was a 
crying need if the entire past of the nation was going 
to sanction the latest hierarchical development. The 


62 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


response was not immediate, but it came at length 
embodied in the books of Chronicles . These were 
written about 300 B.C., and are a reconstruction of the 
entire history of Israel, in order to compel the sanction 
of that history for that scheme of priestly worship 
which had been developed in Babylon and set up in 
Jerusalem by Ezra and Nehemiah. 

The perception of the true character of the books 
of Chronicles , as a systematic reconstruction and 
perversion of the national history in the interest 
of the priests and levites, was one of the first results 
of a more scientific study of the Bible. Though 
they are placed in our English version, following 
the Septuagint, next after the Kings , in the Jewish 
Canon they were and are placed with the Writings , 
and are the last in order. Such a position is appro- 
priate, not only to their date of composition, but 
also to their moral quality, the absence of all literary 
conscience from the compiler’s scheme of work. In- 
cluding the present books of Ezra and Nehemiah , 
they were written in the third century, B. C,, some- 
where along from the beginning to the middle of it. 
Their author was a levite of the temple, apparently 
among the singers, so knowing is he about the 
singers’ ways and doings. What he attempts is to 
write the history of his people, from the time of 
Adam down to his own time. But the first five 
chapters are a long and tiresome string of geneal- 
ogies. full of difficulties for the apologists who en- 
deavor to harmonize them with the genealogies of 
Genesis . After the genealogies Saul is disposed of 
in a single chapter, and then the account of David’s 


THE HISTORIES . 


63 


reign runs on to the end of the first book. The 
subsequent history of Judah is narrated in the 
second book. The history of the Northern King- 
dom is treated with comparative neglect. The ob- 
ject of the writer is to exhibit the kings of Judah, 
as far as possible, as faithful servants of Yahweh, or 
— which in his mind is the same thing — as stout 
defenders of the temple-service, and the rights and 
privileges of the priests and tevites. His work was 
based very largely upon older writings, of which he 
names at least a dozen. Strangely enough the pre- 
sent books of Samuel and Kings are not among 
those named. But these also must have been 
among his sources. Whatever his materials, they 
were all fluid in the heat of his levitic zeal, 
and all received the impress of his cherished theory, 
that the acceptable worship of Yahweh consisted in 
the minute observance of a ceremonial and sacri- 
ficial system of religion, centralized in the one 
temple at Jerusalem. Hence an astonishing re- 
construction of the national history, and of the 
character of individual kings. The unconscious 
idealization of the prophetic historians of Samuel 
and Kings was sternly critical and splendidly vera- 
cious in comparison with the unlicensed freedom 
of this 1 orthodox liar for God.’ Everything that 
helps his case is made prominent. Everything 
that hinders it is cast into the shade. The persistent 
idolatry of the nation is scarcely mentioned, except 
where it is needed as a background to bring out 
the virtue of the kings who labored to suppress it. 
David and Solomon especially appear in such new 


64 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


guise that they bear hardly the least resemblance 
to the David and Solomon of the earlier histories. 
Solomon had up to this time all the credit of build- 
ing the temple, and originating its service, but in 
the popular imagination Solomon was no such pious 
king as David. What then does the Chronicler do 
but transfer to David the entire credit of the de- 
sign of the temple, and the organization of the 
temple service? Nothing remains for Solomon but 
to carry out the plans of David. The fondness of 
Solomon for other forms of worship than that of 
Yahweh is passed over lightly, and made to appear 
the sin of his old age, and, in the same oriental spirit 
that makes, Eve seduce her husband, his wives are 
charged with his defection. Manasseh, whose reign 
lasted all the way from 695, B. C., to 640 — the longest 
reign of any king of Judah, and the most prosperous 
and peaceful — offered a very knotty problem to the 
Chronicler, who, with Ezekiel, believed that national 
prosperity depended on the faithful service of Yah- 
weh, for Manasseh fostered all the abominations of 
the Canaanites. And so Manasseh is made to suffer 
captivity, and to repent in dust and ashes for his 
wickedness. But for neither repentance nor cap- 
tivity is there any warrant in the earlier and more 
truthful histories. The story is perhaps the earliest 
prototype of a numerous class of famous recanta- 
tions, of which Voltaire's and Thomas Paine’s are 
modern illustrations, and equally without a particle 
of evidence. 

The conclusion to which we are compelled con- 
cerning Chronicles is one which is but little to our 


THE HISTORIES. 65 

taste, but it is a conclusion at which the most care- 
ful and conservative scholarship arrived long since. 
To maintain their authority, and heighten their 
prestige, the Jewish priesthood stooped to falsify 
the characters of men, the course of history, attri- 
buting the ceremonial inventions of their own time 
to the prevision of David and the inspiration of 
Yahweh. But surely there is nothing unexampled 
in this turpitude. We have no reason to suppose 
that the Jewish hierarchy was more truthful or 
honest than the Roman hierarchy of the middle 
ages, and we know that this concocted a whole 
batch of donations of Pepin and Charlemagne and 
Isidorian decretals to make good its ecclesiastical 
pretensions. For the Chronicler, as for the authors 
of Daniel and the Book of Origins, this only can be 
said, that “ making history” appears to have been 
the order of the day, and literary conscience as un- 
discovered yet as the Western Hemisphere or the 
telephone. 

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah in their present 
form are by the author of the Chronicles , and were 
written at the same time (post 300, B. C.) In fact 
they were originally a part of the Chronicles. But 
their value is much enhanced for us by the fact 
that they contain considerable portions of contem- 
porary history, written by Ezra and Nehemiah. 
Not only is the time of which they write exceed- 
ingly interesting and important, covering as it did 
the publication of the Law, but it succeeds to fifty- 
nine years of absolute silence, a silence carrying in 
its fruitful womb the germs of Ezra's reformation. 


66 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


The book of Esther was one of the latest books 
received into the third division of the Jewish canon. 
It was received in spite of much misgiving. There 
was nothing religious in its tone. The name of 
God does not occur in it. But these scruples once 
conquered, it entered on a great career. To Chris- 
tians the least perhaps of all the Old Testament 
books; to Jews it has been one of the most precious. 
It has symbolized their national exclusiveness, their 
hatred of their various oppressors. The object of 
this book was to naturalize in Judea the feast of 
Purim , a feast which Persian Jews would seem to 
have borrowed from the Persians. In order to in- 
duce the Palestinian Jews to adopt this feast, the 
author of the book of Esther writes a purely ficti- 
tious, but exceedingly affecting story, which pur- 
ports to give the origin of the feast. In later times, 
as often as this feast has been celebrated in the 
Jewish synagogues, the place has rung with curses 
shouted by all the congregation, the reader of Es- 
ther running together the names of all of Haman’s 
sons, to indicate that they were strangled all at 
once, the boys making as much noise as possible 
with stones and blocks of wood, on which they 
have written Haman’s odious name against the 
moment when the reader and the congregation 
shout together, “ Let his name be blotted out.” 

Such are the books from which the history ol 
Israel is to be gathered up. The task would be 
a hopeless one if we had not the writings of the 
prophets to set over against them for several cen- 
turies; if they did not furnish much unconscious 


THE HISTORIES. 


67 


testimony to the inaccuracy of their own assump- 
tions; if we could not read between the lines of the 
idealizing and perverting annalists. Thanks to the 
industry and patience of such scholars as Ewald and 
Kuenen, we are enabled to do this, and to arrive in 
consequence at certain definite results. I should 
like nothing better than to set forth these results 
with free elaboration, but this would need a course 
of lectures by itself. This evening I can do no 
more than set forth in the briefest manner the 
course of Israel’s political and religious history. 

First, the political : In all strictness this does not 
begin until the Exodus from Egypt in 1320. And 
there are some things antecedent to the Exodus 
which we can dimly fashion. For centuries before 
the Exodus — such would appear to be the import 
of the patriarchal stories — Semitic hordes from be- 
yond the Euphrates were pushing down into Arabia 
and Palestine and Egypt. Sometimes the races al- 
ready in possession forced them back. The journey 
of Abraham was most likely the migration of a 
tribe, its starting point, Ur of the Chaldees, being 
about one hundred and fifty miles due south of 
modern Erzerum, on the south side of the Taurus. 
The journey of Jacob back into Haran was a great 
backward movement of the swaying mass ; his sub- 
sequent return to Canaan another great migration. 
Joseph in Egypt possibly represents the first wave 
of migration into Egypt, followed ere long by that 
of kindred tribes. But these Hebrews, which means 
men from across — from across the Euphrates — were 
not the first Semitic tribes to go down. They were 


68 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


the last. About 2100 B. C. lower Egypt was con- 
quered by a Semitic race, which ruled over it till 
1580, B. C., when it was driven out by the native 
Egyptians, who had maintained themselves in upper 
Egypt. At one time the Hebrews were identified 
with these Semitic rulers of Egypt, the Hyksos or 
Shepherd Kings. Josephus set the fashion of this 
way of thinking. It was very flattering to his na- 
tional pride. The Hebrews were a later wave of 
immigration, and they remained in Egypt after the 
Shepherd Kings, of whom Joseph’s Pharaoh was one, 
had gone. “A king arose who knew not Joseph.” 
In other words the native Egyptians had re-con- 
quered lower Egypt. So long as the Israelites could 
be kept contented they made a living wall between 
the banished Hyksos and the Egyptians. But they 
at last grew restless under the oppression of the 
great Rameses II. and under his son Menephtha 
(Amenophis.) they rebelled, and aided by the 
Hyksos they broke away from their allegiance, and 
resumed their old nomadic life. Such was the Ex- 
odus, the Bible date of which is 1491. Instead of 
this date write 1320, as the best approximation we 
can make, by carefully comparing the Pentateuch 
and Manetho (an Egyptian historian), and the monu- 
ments. 

The Hebrews of the Exodus were an aggregation 
of different tribes, more or less closely bound to- 
gether by ties of blood and worship, but by no 
means a united nation. The towering personality 
of Moses was equal to the task of holding them to- 
gether in the act of their rebellion and deliverance, 


THE HISTORIES . 


69 


but after that there was but little ol united action. 
The different tribes went each its way to plant and 
graze between the mountains of Seir and the Eu- 
phrates. Some of them conquered the district east 
of the Jordan, with the help of the Moabites 
Several uniting under Joshua, assisted by the 
Midianites and Edomites, pushed their way into 
Canaan about forty years after the Exodus ; 
(perhaps nearer fifty than forty.) There was no 
sudden conquest ; there was no apportionment 
of the territory among the different tribes, 
though these things were imagined at a later 
day. The period of the Judges, extending about 
two hundred years from the invasion, was a period 
of anarchy and internecine wars among the tribes, 
some of which were at times subject to the Canaan- 
ites, a people much more highly civilized than 
themselves. Now and then a judge like Gideon or 
Deborah succeeded in uniting two or more of the 
tribes against the common enemy, but oftener it 
was every tribe for itself, and the Canaanite took 
the hindmost. 

To Saul, the son of Kish, and of the tribe of 
Benjamin, belongs the glory, as to no other, of 
arousing the sentiment of nationality, and fusing 
the discordant tribal elements into a political unit. 
It was at no chance meeting that Samuel anointed 
him as king, but he proved himself a natural leader 
in many a hard fought battle with the Philistines, 
and then the people’s acclamation was his best an- 
ointing. His reign was short, but did him no dis- 
honor. Somehow he was not fierce enough for 


70 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

Samuel against the Canaanites, for it was Samuel’s 
disposition to destroy them root and branch. Hence 
mutual alienation, and the withdrawal from Saul of 
the prophetic party, which attached itself to a rising 
captain of the tribe of Judah, David, the son of 
Jesse. Defeated in a battle with the Philistines, 
Saul took his life with his own hand. David was a 
man after Yahweh’s own heart ; that is he exactly 
suited the prophets. He had none of Saul’s scru- 
ples about slaughtering the. Canaanites. Coming to 
the throne in 1058 B. C., he ruled with varying for- 
tunes till 1018 B. C., a period of forty years. Tak- 
ing Jerusalem, he set up his court there, and organ- 
ized it with a rude magnificence. But his throne 
was not a comfortable seat. There were conspira- 
tors on the right hand and on the left. He had his 
band of foreign mercenaries to protect him. With 
many wives came many jealousies, and the rebellion 
of his sons. But he was every inch a king, and con- 
solidated the nation, and subdued its enemies, and 
utilized the zeal alike of priests and prophets. His 
reign and Solomon’s of equal length, with Saul’s 
two years, cover the entire period of the united 
monarchy. The splendor of Solomon’s reign pre- 
pared and hastened the catastrophe. He was an 
oriental despot, pure and simple ; a secular mon- 
arch ; indifferent to religion save as it ministered 
to his love of pageantry. Immediately upon his 
death the kingdom split asunder. The Northern 
Kingdom was much more unstable than the South- 
ern. Every little while a king or dynasty was over- 
turned, and the event was signalized by indiscrim- 


THE HISTORIES. 


7 1 


inate slaughter of the weaker party. Hitherto the 
Israelites had fought among themselves, or with 
their Semitic neighbors. But now began to loom 
up in the East those mighty monarchies, Assyria 
and Babylon, and ere long the Semitic genius was 
confronted, in the form of Persia, with that Aryan 
genius, with which it was one day to marry, and 
bring forth the stalwart brood of modern civiliza- 
tion. The first contact of Judah with her Semitic 
cousins* was not pleasantly suggestive. 

“ The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold." 

He kept on coming. In fact Judah invited 
him to protect her against Israel. In 719 the 
Northern Kingdom, after a separate existence of 
two hundred and fifty-nine years, ceased to exist, 
and ten tribes out of the original twelve pass out 
of history into the realm of wildest possible vaga- 
ries. The Southern Kingdom enjoyed another cen- 
tury of comparative prosperity, but just as she had 
committed hersejf, at the instigation of Josiah, to 
Yahweh’s keeping, as never before, and looked to 
him to conquer all her enemies, in came the Egyp- 
tians, soon followed by the Chaldeans, and in 586, 
B. c., Judah followed Ephraim into captivity. From 
this time forward Judea, from a political point of 
view, was not of much account. Henceforth its 
history is the history of a religion, not of a state. 
In 536, B. C., a colony of the captives came back to 
Jerusalem, and rebuilt the. temple, so mean a copy 
of the first that the old men who had seen that 

* The Assyrians and Chaldeans were Semitic peoples, with an 
infusion of Akkadian (probably Turanian) blood. 


7 2 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


wept at the sight of this, but a larger and better 
part o? the exiles preferred their new home to the 
old. The government at Jerusalem was a govern- 
ment of priests, under the generous patronage of 
the Persian monarchy. When Persia succumbed to 
Alexander the Great, Judea passed into his hands 
in 332, B. c. Upon his death it fell to the share of 
the Egyptian Ptolemies, though not without a 
struggle, which ended in 301. A century of Egyp- 
tian rule was followed in 203, B. C., by the rule of 
the Syrian Selucidae, another remnant of Alexan- 
ders Empire. Antiochus Epiphanes,* the reigning 
king, attempting to crush out the Jewish religion, 
roused so much opposition, headed by Judas Mac- 
cabaeus, that in 164, B. c., Jerusalem was recaptured, 
and in 138 the independence of Judea was acknow- 
ledged. Next, in 63, B. C., came the Roman Pom- 
pey, and in 37 the Idumean (Edomite) Herod, who, 
with the help of Rome, made himself king. Still 
for another century Judea fretted under the galling 
yoke, and then broke out once more in flat rebel- 
lion, only suppressed with the destruction of Jeru- 
salem and the extinction of the Jewish state, in the 
year 70 of the Christian era. Thus you will see the 
cycle of Jewish history from 1320 B. C. the date of 
the Exodus, to 70, A. D., lacked but ten years of 
fourteen centuries. 

If Israel had nothing for us but this political his- 
tory, though these dry bones were clothed in palpi- 
tating flesh, her career would have for us but little 
fascination. But parallel with this political history 

* The Illustrious ; a favorite pun made it Epimanes, the Mad. 


THE HISTORIES. 


73 


runs a religious history of commanding interest, and 
of unique importance. Even the political history 
of Israel upon examination proves to be very dif- 
ferent from popular conceptions, but the religious 
history differs from these more widely still, for ac- 
cording to these conceptions even the patriarchs 
were monotheists of so pure an order that for Moses 
to reveal a purer God than theirs would seem im- 
possible. To Moses again is attributed a lofty 
spiritual monotheism, intolerance of all idolatry, 
and the promulgation of every legal precept in the 
books of Deuteronomy and Numbers and Leviticus. 
To the early prophets also is attributed a mono- 
theism as lofty and spiritual as that of Isaiah and 
Micah and the Great Unknown of the captivity. 
Compelled to see that the idolatrous worship of 
Yahweh and the worship of other gods was never 
rooted out till after the captivity, all this is, com- 
monly regarded as a lapse from some primeval 
purity of faith and worship. 

The scientific study of the Bible leads the modern 
student to conclusions very different from these. 
He learns that the monotheism of patriarchal times 
was purely imaginary ; a reflection back upon those 
times of men’s beliefs who lived centuries later. 
The religion of Israel, like that of every other 
people, began in fetichism, pure and simple, in the 
deification and worship of petty natural objects, trees 
and stones. These trees and stones were afterwards 
adopted into the higher faith, and interpreted as 
monuments set up in honor of Yahweh, or as mark- 
ing the site of some appearance of the deity to man. 


74 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


The tribes in Goshen had already risen above fe* 
tichism for the most part, or at least to some ex- 
tent, into nature worship.* But the worship of 
many gods does not preclude special devotion to 
one. The principal God of Israel in Egypt was a 
god of light and fire, a dreadful god, much more 
closely akin to the Ammonitish Molech and the 
Moabitish Chemosh than to the Phenician Baal. 
The fiercer and gloomier aspects of nature were 
those in which the Israelites saw the lineaments of 
their deity. And so conceiving him, they wor- 
shipped him with cruel rites, with human sacrifices. 
The dedication of the first born and circumcisionf 
were rites that could have had their origin only in 
the brutal worship of a deity brutally conceived. 
The principal god was worshipped under the image 
of a bull, and the bull worship of Yahweh continued 
in the Northern Kingdom until its extinction in 719. 
The festival of the new moon dated from the old 
nature worship, and the institution of the Sabbath 
from the dedication of every seventh day to Kewan 
or Saturn, also worshipped as a god. It is most 
likely that the names El Shaddai, Adonai, Elohim 
and Yahweh were at first names of different gods. 
The idols called teraphim , which were in common 
use till after David’s time, were idols of one or the 
other of these gods. David was not so good a 
Yahwehist but that he had one in his house. 

*The worship of the great forms and aspects and forces of nature : 
Polytheism when the deity is abstracted from the object or force. 

f A part for the whole : the underlying principle of all sacrificial 
mutilation. See Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology ; Cere- 
monial Government, III. ; Mutilations. 


THE HISTORIES. 


7 5 


The function of Moses was not only that of a l 
deliverer. He was a religious enthusiast. He se- l 
lected Yahweh from all the gods of the Israelites, 1 
as the one most worthy of honor. Why he did this 
we cannot tell. Perhaps he was the god of his own 
tribe. But his great service was to connect the 
worship of him with morality. He did this in the 
ten commandments. But Moses was no monothe- 
ist. He believed that there were many gods, but 
that only one should be worshipped. Nor did he 
object to the idolatrous worship of Yahweh. The 
commandment against this was of much later origin. 

From Moses’ time to Hosea’s, a period of five ' 
hundred years, monolatry , the worship of one God, 
and that God Yahweh, was the loftiest ideal of 
Israel’s religion. And even this was an ideal too 
lofty for any general realization, though it did not 
demand any lofty conception of the god, nor his 
worship without an image. Samuel was a stout 
monolatrist. No god for him but Yahweh. But 
he could offer a human sacrifice to him with perfect 
confidence. Elijah and Elisha were stout monola- 
trists. No god for them but Yahweh. But, appa- 
rently, his worship under the form of a bull never 
impressed them as wrong, or even doubtful. And 
Samuel and Elijah and Elisha were none of them 
monotheists. They never doubted the existence of 
Baal and Chemosh and Milcom and Molech. It 
was reserved for the great prophets of the eighth j 
century to do this. 

I have said that even monolatry , the exclusive 
worship of Yahweh, and this too with the use of 


;6 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


images, was too lofty an ideal for general realiza- 
tion. The worship of other gods with him was 
commoner than the exclusive worship of Yahweh. 
Not only the common people were guilty of it, but 
the kings of both Ephraim and Judah, again and 
again. Under the house of Omri, in the North, the 
Baal worship threatened to subvert the Yahweh 
worship altogether. Witness the motley worship 
of Solomon and Ahaz and Manasseh. The pillars 
of Ashera were everywhere planted in the vicinity 
of Yahweh’s altars, and invited men to practice her 
licentious rites. 

In the eighth century before Christianity the 
prophets arrived, for the first time in the religious 
history of Israel, at the purely monotheistic idea : 
that there was only one God, and that he was the 
creator of the universe, and that he must be wor- 
shipped without any image ; that he was a righteous 
God, and was best worshipped with the sacrifices of 
righteousness. Without these the blood of bulls 
and goats was a mockery of him, which he abhorred. 
They did not convince their fellow countrymen of 
this at once. The seventh century B. C. saw but 
little improvement. But as it drew near its close 
the prophets and the Levitical priests united theii 
forces, and embodied their idea in the book of Deu- 
teronomy. The idea was that the true worship of 
Yahweh consisted in sacrifices and righteousness. 
Only the sacrifices must be offered in the^ temple 
at Jerusalem, and there only. The religion of the 
country was violently reformed, even that of the 
northern provinces, on which Assyria had somewhat 


THE HISTORIES. 


77 


relaxed her hold. Surely the day of Yahweh was 
at hand. But first the day of the Chaldean. In 
586, B. c., the temple was destroyed, and the best 
of the people followed the 10,000 who had gone in 
597, B. €., into captivity. 

The period of Israel’s non-existence as a nation 
was the period of her most intense religious activity. 
The fruits of this activity were the prophetic* histo- 
ries of Samuel and Kings , the prophecies of Ezekiel, 
the loftier prophecies of the Deutero-Isaiah , and 
the great Book of Origins . All this was done at 
Babylon, the books of Samuel perhaps excepted. 
And from this time forward the religious life of 
Israel, especially in its literary form, was more active 
in Babylon than in Judea. It was here that that 
wonderful growth, the Talmud, was most carefully 
fostered. It was here that the institution of the 
Synagogue arose, an institution of which our Chris- 
tian Churches are direct descendants, as are our 
ministers of the scribes, who were the teachers in 
the synagogues, the expounders of the Law. 

For fifty-nine years the religious history of Israel, 
as well as the political, is a blank — from 5i6f to 
457, B. C. — when Ezra arrived in Jerusalem with 
1500 men, besides a number of priests and levites. 
In 445 Nehemiah followed, and soon after these to- 
gether published the Pentateuch in much its present 
form, the levitical law of Numbers and Leviticus now 
making its first appearance. Not amid the thun- 
ders of Sinai, but amid the thunders of Babylon 
was the Law delivered ; and not to Moses, but to 

* Written from the prophetic standpoint, 
f When the second temple was completed. 


78 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


same daring innovator, whose fame would have 
been fatal to his work. The publication of the 
Law announced the death of prophecy. The wor- 
ship of the letter succeeded to the freedom of the 
spirit. The new order was in reality the last result 
of that compromise between prophetism and the 
priest, which the book of Deuteronomy had signal- 
ized. Then the priests had the best of it. Now 
they had everything their own way. 

But the religious development of Judaism had 
not yet arrived at its conclusion. Persian influ- 
ences made themselves felt. Hence doctrines of 
angels and the devil ; hence also the doctrine of a 
future life, and of the resurrection of the body. 

\ Nor was the political cycle of Judaism completed 
until it had developed on the religious side into the 
Christianity of Jesus and of Paul, a magnificent re- 
volt against the worship of the letter, the subordi- 
nation of righteousness to formal worship, and the 
exclusiveness which even prophetism had done 
much to nourish. 

I thoroughly appreciate how different this presen- 
tation of the matter is from the conceptions of the 
popular theology. We have here in these Old Tes- 
tament histories no supernatural writings. More 
i natural were never written ; nor more human either. 
They are human in their errors, in their false pre- 
tensions, in their thousand imperfections, but also 
in their grandeur and simplicity, their infinite and 
nameless charm. And so with the religion. It is 
no ladder let down. It is no supernatural revela- 
tion. It is built from the earth up with various 


THE HISTORIES. 


79 


blunder and mishap. It is an evolution, step by 
step, from small and poor beginnings to such con- 
clusions as are still remote. From fetichism and 
nature worship up to the filial heart of Jesus! It 
took a little more than thirteen centuries for the 
religious sentiment to journey from the first of 
these points to the last. That was not very long, 
it seems to me, for such a journey. In the joy of 
its completion, is it not almost pleasant to remem- 
ber the hundred glooms and terrors of the way ? 


THIRD LECTURE. 


THE LAW : MOSES AND THE PENTATEUCH. 

The subject of my lecture this evening is a sub- 
ject within a subject. The more general and inclu- 
sive subject is Moses and the Pentateuch . The 
more particular and included subject is the Law. 
In the Jewish division of the Old Testament into 
the Law , the Prophets and the Writings , the first 
division, the Law , corresponds to the Pentateuch . 
(Originally it corresponded to the Pentateuch plus 
the book of Joshuai) But the Pentateuch , strictly 
speaking, contains a good deal which is not law, 
but history. Of this historic element in the Penta- 
teuch I spoke with some fullness in my last lecture, 
so that I might properly enough devote myself en- 
tirely to the legal element this evening. But I am 
aware that some of you fancied that I disposed 
somewhat too summarily of the Mosaic authorship 
of the Pentateuch , and I am not sorry to repeat 
myself concerning a matter the bearings of which 
I might easily fail to impress upon you in a single 
lecture. 

By the Pentateuch , as doubtless you are all 
aware, is meant the first five books of the Old 
Testament, Genesis , Exodus , Leviticus , Numbers and 
Deuteronomy . The word Pentateuch does not mean, 
80 


THE LA W. 


8l 


however, the five books, but the five-fold book. The 
origin of this division is unknown, except that it 
was Greek, and not Hebrew, and therefore must 
have been subsequent to the Septuagint transla- 
tion, and not before the beginning of the Christian 
era. The division is generally agreed to be quite 
arbitrary. A three-fold division, Ewald thinks, 
would be more natural, thus: I. Genesis ; 2. Exo- 
dus , Leviticus and Numbers ; 3. Deuteronomy. But 
even this would correspond to no definite lines of 
authorship. The five books as they stand at pre- 
sent are really one great book, — e pluribus unum , we 
shall soon conclude, needing the book of Joshua to 
make it a more perfect unit. 

So few, even of the most conservative scholars, \ 
are at the present time disposed to contend for the 
Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch in its present 
form, that it is difficult to believe that within a few 
years the denial of this has been regarded as a hor- 
rible offence against the Bible and religion, and J:hat 
in the majority of Christian pulpits the Mosaic 
authorship is still confidently assumed. First of 
all consider very briefly the history of the contro- 
versy. Doubts of the Mosaic authorship of the 
Pentateuch were entertained by a few distinguished 
scholars (notably by Jerome, decidedly the scholar, 
and almost the only one with any critical percep- 
tion) among the fathers of the Church. But then 
for more than a thousand years the Mosaic author- 
ship had full credit. Late in the seventeenth cen- 
tury we find Hobbes, the English philosopher of 
the Restoration, throwing doubt upon it, and 


82 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


Spinoza, the father of modern criticism, what- 
ever be his rank as a philosopher, was still 
more explicit in the same direction. But the 
controversy, which has since been so protracted 
and so violent, was not fairly inaugurated until As- 
truc, a French physician, in 1753, announced the 
discovery of two parallel documents in Genesis , 
characterized by different designations of the deity. 
This discovery was at once allowed by various crit- 
ics, but strenuously denied by others. Little by 
little the theory of the fragmentary composition of 
the Pentateuch gained ground, until now it would 
be difficult to find a scholar of even respectable 
ability who would not concede that if the bulk of 
the Pentateuch came originally from the hands of 
Moses, this bulk has since his time been subject to 
much alteration and enlargement.- The existence 
of the different documents is almost universally 
allowed, and, when it is denied, the denial is sup- 
ported with such elaborate ingenuity as is its own 
sufficient refutation. The formal designation of the 
different fragments which have been combined to 
form the Pentateuch, has been carried further by 
Ewald than by any other scholar. He contends 
for at least eight different documents united in the 
Pentateuch, the most considerable of which are the 
Book of Covenants , the Book of Origins, or Elohistic 
document, a couple of prophetic narrations of the 
primitive history, and the book of Deuteronomy. 
Besides all these there was a final redactor or 
editor, whose task it was to fuse these different 
documents into their present unity. This theory 


THE LA IV. 


8 3 


of Ewald has not been very generally accepted as 
a whole by subsequent scholars, to many of whom 
it has seemed too nice in its discriminations. But 
many of its features, and these the most important, 
have found very general acceptance. Of these are 
the separate existence of the Book of Covenants (Exo- 
dus, XXI — XXllL, 19) ; the separate existence of the 
Book of Origins, or Elohistic document ; the separate 
existence of one or more prophetic narrations of the 
primitive histories; the separate existence of the 
book of Deuteronomy. The most general agreement 
as in regard to the distinct character and the date 
(circum 620) of Deuteronomy. The next most gen- 
eral is in regard to the separate and peculiar char- 
acter of the Book of Origins . Its limits too are 
pretty well agreed upon, though it runs in and out 
through all the rest, from the beginning of Genesis 
to the end of Joshua. The most doubtful points 
in the controversy at the present time are concern- 
ing the age of the Book of Origins, and as to the 
prophetic narrations; whether there is more than 
one, and if so, what are their limits. In regard to 
this last point it surely will not do to be dogmatic. 
The most important question of all concerning the 
Pentateuch is the age and general trustworthiness of 
the Book of Origins . And here, it seems to me, the 
opinion of Ewald has been effectually disproved by 
later critics. It was his opinion that this important 
fragment of the Pentateuch was written in the time 
of Solomon. It is the opinion of later critics that 
it originated in Babylon, for the most part after the 
return of the first colony of captives to Jerusalem, 
in 536, B C. 


84 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


These last results are far enough from the con* 
ventional belief that Moses was the author of the 
Pentateuch, and wrote it all, even to the account of 
his own death, by supernatural inspiration, but they 
have been reached by a process of critical evolution, 
which has admitted of no leaps. Little by little 
successive scholars have modified the opinions of 
their predecessors, until the satisfactory results of 
Kuenen and his school have been developed. Even 
these may not be final. Many of their details no 
doubt are capable of better explication. But in the 
main they constitute an order in criticism as new 
and irreversible as in astronomy the discovery by 
Copernicus of the motion of the earth around the 
sun. 

Turning now from the history of the controversy 
to its merits, the wonder is that so many scholars 
have argued so laboriously to disprove a theory 
which never had any critical standing-room what- 
ever, but rested wholly on a late and irresponsible 
fj tradition. Not until about the time when Chris- 
tianity arose, some 1300 years after the death of 
Moses, did the tradition obtain currency that Moses 
was the author of the Pentateuch . The tradition 
/originated at this time in the schools of the Rab- 
bis, and was one of a circle of traditions which 
(ascribed various books, or sets of books, in the Old 
/Testament to those who figured in them most con- 
siderably. Thus the book of Joshua was ascribed 
to Joshua, and the books of Saimiel to Samuel. 
But so uncritical were the Jewish Rabbis, that a 
tradition of theirs on a point of this sort well nigh 


THE LA W. 


8 b ' 

affords its own sufficient refutation. It would 
hardly be too much to say that their decisions in 
regard to the authorship of doubtful books were 
always wrong. How could they well be otherwise, 
when their ideas of proof were much the same as 
those of the early Christian fathers; if anything, yet 
more irrational ! And one of these, Irenseus, argued 
that there must be four Gospels, and no more, be- 
cause the wind blew from four quarters, and there 
were four parts to the cross ; and another, Gregory 
the Great, finds the twelve Apostles and the clergy 
in the seven sons of Job, and the lay worshippers of 
the Trinity in his three daughters. 

If Moses were indeed the author of the Penta- 
teuch we should naturally expect to find a good 
many hints of this in other parts of the Bible. 
Even in the New Testament, which was, of course, 
written after the tradition of the Mosaic authorship 
had obtained general currency, there is no single \ 
statement that necessarily implies that Moses was \ 
the author. And if there were a thousand, they 
would all have as much value, and no more, as the 
tradition upon which they were based. The writers 
of the New Testament had no more aptitude for 
criticism than the Jewish Rabbis and the- early 
Christian fathers. Paul, the most scholarly among 
them, had been a pupil of the Rabbis, and his 
methods of Biblical interpretation were the Rab- 
binical methods. 

Turning to the Old Testament, we find that even 
a tradition of the Mosaic authorship of the Penta- . 
teuch is nowhere to be found. A modern writer 


86 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


says, “ The Pentateuch expressly claims to be the 
work of Moses.” For proof we are referred to 
various passages in Deuteronomy. But now that 
criticism has detached the book of Deuteronomy 
from the rest of the Pentateuch , these passages must 
be regarded as referring to the book of Deuteronomy 
alone, and the book of Deuteronomy is the very por- 
tion of the Pentateuch which the most various critics 
have declared is not Mosaic. But even if these pas- 
sages, or any others in the Pentateuch asserted the 
Mosaic authorship of the whole with unequivocal 
distinctness, such testimony would go for little in 
comparison with the internal evidence afforded by 
the Pentateuch itself. For we know it was the cus- 
tom of writers, for hundreds of years before and 
after the beginning of the Christian era, to ascribe 
their books to celebrated persons in the hope of 
giving them a wider currency and insuring for them 
a larger measure of authority. Whether they could 
do this conscientiously it is difficult to determine. 
But that they did do it, more than one book in 
either Testament bears ample witness. 

The testimony to the Mosaic authorship of the 
Pentateuch , beyond its own limits in the Old Testa- 
ment, is feeble in the extreme. The passages are 
very few in number, and in them such expressions 
as, “ the Book of the Law of Moses * ” are suffi- 
ciently explained as referring to Deuteronomy , with 
the exception of those which occur in Chronicles 
and Malachi and Nehemiah, which were manifestly 
written after the completion of the Pentateuclu 

*11. Kings, xiv., 6. 


THE LA IV. 


87 

But such expressions, even when referring to the 
Pentateuch as a whole, do not imply that Moses 
wrote the Pentateuch, but only that “ the law ” con- 
tained in it was promulgated by Moses. Whether 
it was is a question which we cannot entertain at 
present, while our concern is not with the origin of 
the Law, but with the authorship of the Pentateuch. 
It is a remarkable fact that in all the writings of 
the prophets, who are commonly supposed to have 
planted themselves firmly on the law of Moses, the 
name- of Moses occurs only four times: once in 
Micah , once in Jeremiah , once in the Deutero-Isaiah , 
and once in Malachi ; and Malachi, the last of the 
prophets, is the only prophet who makes any 
reference whatever to the law of Moses. 

There is then nowhere in the Bible even an un- 
mistakeable tradition of the Mosaic authorship of 
the Pentateuch , though if there were, it would be no 
sufficient testimony in the teeth of so much oppo- 
sition furnished by the internal evidences of the 
book itself to its diverse and post-Mosaic origin. 
These I will briefly summarize, and then proceed to 
state some of the positive results of scientific criti- 
cism in regard to the gradual development of the 
Pentateuch into its present form. 

I must confess however that it is with some re- 
luctance that I spend our precious time in adducing 
arguments against a theory in favor of which there 
is no argument whatever, only a groundless preju- 
dice and a tradition stamped by the mint from 
which it came as counterfeit. 

The first internal evidences of non-Mosaic author- 


88 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


ship by which Biblical scholars were arrested, were 
those furnished by historical, geographical, archaeo- 
logical and explanatory passages implying a differ- 
ent state of things from that which existed in the 
time of Moses. For a sample of such passages 
take, “ And the Canaanite was then in the land.’' 
(Genesis, XII., 6.) Evidently this was written after 
the expulsion of the Canaanite which was not com- 
pleted for several centuries after the death of 
, Moses. There are many similar passages. In Gen- 
esis, XXXVI. 31, we read, “Before there reigned any 
king over the land of Israel.” Evidently this was 
written after the establishment of the kingdom, and 
so at least two hundred years after the death of 
Moses. “The nations that were before you,” in 
Leviticus, xvill., 28, of course, implies that the 
Canaanites have been already conquered. “ Now 
the man Moses was very meek above all the men 
that were upon the face of the earth.” Very 
learned critics can convince themselves that Moses 
wrote this, but they cannot convince any unlearned 
person of ordinary common sense. The formula 
unto this day in its connection is frequent proof that 
the writer’s time is long subsequent to the events 
which he narrates. Again, there are various pas- 
sages in the Pentateuch , implying that their author 
was a resident of Palestine, and so could not be 
Moses. In Deuteronomy , XIX., 14, we read, “Thou 
shalt not remove thy neighbor’s land-mark, which 
they of old time have set in thine inheritance;” In 
Leviticus, XXVI., 34, 35, — 43, neglect to keep the 
Sabbath in the past for a long time „ is spoken of as a 


THE LA W. 


89 

reason for the captivity. Critics contending for the 
Mosaic authorship have sometimes tried to break 
the force of these and many similar passages, by 
calling them interpolations. But as there is not 
the least reason for regarding them as such, except 
that they do not harmonize with the theory of 
Mosaic authorship, it is a manifest begging of the 
question to resort to such a theory. 

There are things omitted as well as things in- 
serted, which do not tally with the authorship of 
Moses. The most notable of these is the omission 
of any account whatever of thirty-eight years out of 
the forty, during which the Israelites were wander- 
ing in the wilderness. In Numbers , XX., 1, the Is- } 
raelites come to Kadesh, where Miriam dies. In 
the twenty-second verse they remove from Kadesh 
and come to Mount Hor. But these events, we 
learn from a subsequent chapter, were thirty-eight 
years apart. What must we infer if not that the 
Pentateuch was written so long after the Exodus and 
the time of Moses that all tradition even of those 
eight and thirty years had faded from the mem- 
ories of men. 

The next and most important argument for the 
post-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is the ex- 
istence within its limits of at least* two leading 
documents. These are known to critics as the 
Elohistic and Yahwehistic, or Jehovistic, documents, 
because in one of them the use of the name Yahweh 
for the god of Israel is carefully avoided until Exodus 
VI., 2, 3, where it is fold how the god revealed him- 

*An older Elohist document can also be detected. See page 98, 


9 o 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


self to Moses by his name Yahweh, by which he had 
not before been known, while in the other the 
names Yahweh and Elohim are used indifferently 
throughout the book of Genesis. After Exodus , VI., 
2, 3, the Elohistic writer also uses the two names 
indifferently, and so it becomes more difficult to keep 
the two documents distinct. It may be sometimes 
quite impossible. But having once been put upon the 
scent of the two documents by the different divine 
names, we discover that this difference is but the 
smallest part of all the difference that exists be- 
tween them ; and, the nature of this further differ- 
ence having been discovered by it, we can track the 
different documents up to Deuteronomy, in the con- 
cluding parts of which there are a few verses of the 
Elohist, and then on again all through the book of 
Joshua. 

On the very threshold of the Pentateuch we are 
confronted by these diverse documents. Thus in 
Genesis, I. — II., 3, we have one account of the crea- 
tion, and in Genesis II., 4, — III., 24, another, which is 
widely different. The first of these is Elohistic ; 
the second Yahwehistic. Again, in Genesis VI. — IX., 
we have two entirely different accounts of the flood. 
But it would be very wearisome to continue the 
enumeration. In Davidson’s Introduction to the Old 
Testament you will find a careful list of all the Elo- 
histic and Yahwehistic passages. And in the majority 
of cases by referring to them in the Bible, you will 
be able to discover for yourselves the lines of de- 
marcation, for both the manner and the spirit of 
these two documents are indeed very different. 


THE LA IV. 


91 


The Yahwehistic is much the fresher, simpler, more 
spontaneous. It tells the patriarchal stories in 
their most engaging forms. The Elohistic docu- 
ment, or Book of Origins , is much more studied, 
formal and artificial in its character. But the great 
difference between the two is that one (the Yah- 
wehistic) is dominated throughout by the prophetic 
spirit, while the other is dominated throughout by 
the priestly spirit in its levitical form. All of the 
levitical legislation of Numbers and Leviticus is in 
the Book of Origins .* 

But allowing the existence of these different doc- 
uments, and their difference of method and aim, 
may not Moses have united them into their present 
form? Not if it proves, as we shall yet discover, 
that the separate documents came into being long 
after his time : the Yahwehistic document some 
five hundred, and the Elohistic some eight hundred 
years. 

* The German critic, Hengstenberg, was in his day easily first of 
all the great protagonists of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateiich 
and its literary and moral unity. The most ingenious of critics, he 
was the least ingenuous. Compelled to acknowledge that the use of 
the different divine names was not always accidental, he resorted to 
the most fanciful hypotheses to prove that it was always intentional. 
Thus Eve says in Genesis , IV., 1 : “I have gotten a man with the 
help of Jehovah,” and in the same chapter, verse 25 : “ God hath 
appointed me another seed instead of Abel.” Whereupon Hengsten- 
berg refines upon the different divine names in the following manner: 
“At the birth of Abel, Eve’s consciousness of the divine presence 
and Being is particularly vivid. By inflicting punishment God has 
shown Himself to be Jehovah ; as Jehovah also He is recognized in 
the benefit. In the birth of her first son Eve discovers a dear pledge 
of his favor. At that of Seth this feeling is not a little qualified, 
She merely recognizes a general divine influence, and the natural- 
ness of the event does not appear to her, as in the first event, entirely 
in the background.” When a critic must ascribe to Eve such psy- 
chological niceties as these, in order to maintain his case, is it not 
evidently time for him to give it up ? 


92 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


Besides the reasons named already for the non* 
Mosaic and diverse authorship of the Pentateuch , 
others might easily be named. Thus it abounds in 
duplicate etymologies, and in duplicate traditions 
of the same transaction, and also in diversities and 
contradictions. The numerous repetitions of the 
legal prescriptions is fatal to the supposition that 
the whole was written by one who stood in any 
such relation to these prescriptions as is ascribed 
to Moses in the text. But not only are these pre- 
scriptions repeated ; they are developed. In the 
Book of Covenants {Exodus XXI. — XXIII., 19), in Deu- 
teronomy, and in the Book of Origins , we have three 
different sets of laws, corresponding to these differ- 
ent stages of development : the first not levitical at 
all ; the next somewhat more so, but not very 
markedly ; the third intensely and exclusively so. 
That Moses could have published all of them is in- 
conceivable. The first appears to have been pub- 
lished soon after the disruption of the Kingdom 
(circum 900, B. C.) ; the second in the time of King 
Josiah (621, B. C.), and the third by Ezra and Nehe- 
miah, in 445, B. C. 

Here then we may safely leave a question which 
already has detained us far too long. As there is 
nothing on the other side but a tradition and a 
prejudice, enough has already been said to convince 
those who are unprejudiced, and who know the 
value of Rabbinical traditions. But if Moses did 
not write the Pentateuch , is there no part of it 
which can be ascribed to him with perfect confi- 
dence ? Between the two extremes — that he wrote all 


THE LA W, 


93 


of it ; that he wrote none of it — a hundred different 
theories could easily disport themselves, ascribing 
to Moses different degrees of authorship. But the 
most able critics, and those least anxious to deceive 
themselves, assure us that the negative extreme is 
unavoidable. They do nDt deny that there are 
laws and regulations and ideas in the Pentateuch 
stamped by the genius of Moses, but of nothing 
written there can we be certain that he shaped it 
in its present form. In the Ten Commandments 
we approach him most nearly. These we have in 
two versions, the version in Deuteronomy being 
much more expanded than that in Exodus. But 
even the less expanded one, we have reason to be- 
lieve, is much fuller than the original version. The 
Old Testament, in the original Hebrew, speaks of 
ten words, and not of ten commandments. Such a 
designation certainly does not apply to anything 
so full as either of the versions that have come 
down to us. Moreover we have eleven words , al- 
though but ten commandments , “ I am Yahweh, thy 
God,” being undoubtedly one of the ivords. What 
then shall be excluded ? Evidently that portion 
which so expressly forbids the worship of images 
of Yahweh, for, seeing that the image worship of 
Yahweh was kept up by the most zealous followers 
of Moses for six hundred years after his time, — see- 
ing that such great prophets as Elijah and Elisha, 
never questioned the rightfulness of such worship, 
it is impossible to believe that one of the original 
words of Moses was an express prohibition of such 
worship. With this exception, and in a much sim- 


94 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


pier form than they have assumed in the Pentateuch , 
the ten words may confidently be regarded as the 
contribution of Moses to the religion of Israel. 
And although so meagre in its quantity, it was, 
indeed, a splendid contribution. It demanded a 
moral worship of Yahweh. It declared the bans 
between religion and morality. This was an ines- 
timable service. But it was not the only service 
which Moses rendered to his people. From an 
array of many gods he chose the sternest and the 
purest for their national God, and demanded for 
him their undivided allegiance. But this is already 
signified in the first word : I, Yahweh, am thy God. 
What he did more than this was to fuse the differ- 
ent tribes into a unity, compact enough, for the 
time being, to brave the wrath of Egypt, and break 
away from her intolerable oppressions. And to do 
this he must have been as god-like in his make as 
Michael Angelo has fashioned him.* 

“ If Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch , who did?” 
demands the supernaturalist. Alas ! we cannot an- 
swer him. Apparently there was; no vanity of au- 
thorship in those good old times, j With the excep- 
tion of the prophetic writings, the 'books of the Old 
Testament are almost all anonymous. There is this 
at least to be said for those who, like the authors of 
Daniel and Deuteronomy , put forth their own writ- 
ings as the writings of illustrious men who had lived 
long before— there is this at least to be said for 
them : it was not for themselves that they desired 

* The horns in Michael Angelo’s statue of Moses are an attribut e 
of Zeus. 


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95 


the honor and authority which would accrue from 
such a course ; no, but only for the word they had 
to speak, the cause they wished to serve. If only 
this might prosper, they were willing to remain for- 
ever in obscurity. And there they have remained 
until this day. The authors of Samuel . Kings , 
Chronicles are all unknown to us. The greatest too 
of all the prophets is, and must ever be, the Great 
Unknown.* And with the Pentateuch it is just the 
same. The Yahwehist, the Elohist, the Deuterono- 
mist, — men who created, or at least collected, a liter- 
ature which has had a more commanding influence 
than any other on the fortunes of the world, the 
fountain-head of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are 
all unknown to us. They died to fame that Israel 
might live for righteousness, and for the honor of 
her god. 

Of a hundred things that we should like to know in 
regard to the gradual evolution of the Pentateuch into 
its present form we must remain forever ignorant, 
but these are for the most part matters of mere 
curiosity. There is very little about it that is really 
important which is not now accessible to lovers of 
good books. We must not hope to learn anything 
very definite about the Pentateuch in the first stages 
of its growth. The ten words of Moses were per- 
haps the nucleus around which laws and legends 
soon began to cluster. Perhaps there are a few of 
these laws and legends that date back to Moses’ 
time ; some of the legends very possibly date back 
even farther. Certain mythical elements which they 
* Isaiah , XL.— LVI. 


9 6 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


contain do unmistakeably. There are various traces 
in the Pentateuch of writings older than any of its 
principal component parts. Two of these are men- 
tioned by name, the book of Jasher and the book of 
the Wars of Yahweh. The acknowledged quotations 
from these books are very brief, but Ewald thinks 
we can discover many others which are not acknowl- 
edged. But even the book of Jasher , (Jasher means 
“ the upright”), a picture of an ideal king, was proba- 
bly written after the time of David ; and the book of 
the Wars of Yahweh was as late or later in its origin. 
Ewald would also persuade us that there are various 
fragments of an unnamed Biography of Moses scat- 
tered along throughout the Pentateuch as we now 
have it. One of these fragments is, he thinks, the 
list of camp stations in Numbers XXI., which the Book 
of Origins in Numbers XXXIII., develops in its usual 
manner. The truth which underlies these over-nice 
discriminations of Ewald is doubtless this : that 
many an ancient book of songs and legends contri- 
buted its mite into the treasury of the principal 
Pentateuch documents. “ Many voices were there ; 
unknown voices speaking out of the early dawn.” 
The learned may attempt to fix the limits of these 
contributions, but the wise will not attach to their 
conclusions any great importance. 

The earliest document of any considerable length 
which the critics have succeeded in distinguishing 
from the adjoining portions of the Pentateuch , is one 
to which I have incidentally referred already several 
times, Exodus XXI.-XXIII., 19, the Book of Cove- 
nants, so-called by the critics, following Exodiis 


THE LA W. 


97 


XXIV., 7. The narrative in the midst of which it oc- 
curs is in the Yahwehistic document, and was writ- 
ten subsequent to the fall of Northern Israel. But 
the Book of Covenants itself was a production of the 
first century after the disruption of the kingdom. It 
is a very interesting document. The most notable 
thing about it is that the priestly element occupies 
a very subordinate place in it. Its precepts in re- 
gard to feasts and sacrifices are very few and simple 
even in comparison with those of' Deuteronomy, to 
say nothing of the solemn trifling of the Book of 
Origins . The matters mainly insisted on are moral 
and social. The treatment of slaves occupies the 
first place. The penal code would now be consid- 
ered harsh in the extreme, but it was extremely 
mild for the time of its appearance. Even the pro- 
vision “ An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” 
was evidently meant to guard againt more violent 
reprisals. Among the social regulations there are 
many that bespeak a tenderness which argues well 
for those who made them : “ Thou shalt neither vex 
a stranger nor oppress him, for ye were strangers in 
the land of Egypt.” * “ If thou meet thine enemy’s 

ox or ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it 
back to him. And if thou see the ass of him that 
hateth thee, lying under his burden and wouldst for- 
bear to help him thou shalt surely help him.”f There 
is much more of the same sort. And notice, too, the 
reason given for the observance of the sabbath : 
“ that thine ox and thine ass may rest and the son 

* Exodus XXII., 21. 

f Exodus XXIII., 5. 


98 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


of thine hand-maid and the stranger may be re- 
freshed.” How unlike the reason subsequently 
given in the Book of Origins', because Yahweh made 
the world in six days and rested on the seventh. 

From this point onward the history of the devel- 
opment of the Pentateuch is at the same time the 
history of the development of what has now been 
known for twenty-three hundred years as the Law 
of Moses. The Book of Covenants is the first con- 
siderable installment of that Law, and, so far from 
having been promulgated upon Sinai’s top, it was 
the offspring of progressive social inspiration four 
hundred years or more after the death of Moses. 
The next step in the development of the Pentateuch 
was, so to speak, a double one, but though a real 
stride so far as the development of the Pentateuch 
was concerned it was not much of an advance in the 
development of its legal elements. It corresponds 
to the formation of the great Yahwehistic document, 
together with another document ultimately amalga- 
mated with it. I call it a double step because of the 
union of these two documents in its scope. This 
second document* was called the Junior Elohist, so 
long as the great Elohistic document which consti- 
tutes the Book of Origins was supposed to antedate 
it. But we are now obliged if we accept the theory 
of Kuenen in regard to the Book of Origins to call 
it the older Elohist, for it was certainly written as 
early as the eighth century B. C., while the Book of 
Origins was not written till the fifth. We call 

* Steadily ignored by Kuenen, but accepted by other critics of his 
school. 


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99 


its author the older Elohist , because like the writer 
of the Book of Origins he refrains from using the 
name Yahweh for his god, until the time of Moses. 
He never lets the generations before Moses speak of 
Yahweh or offer sacrifices, while the Yahwehist does 
this with perfect freedom. This older Elohist is a 
great believer in dreams, while the Yahwehist never 
mentions them, and the later Elohist is openly 
opposed to them. All the dream stories about the 
patriarchs are from his hand and therefore the 
greater part of the story of Joseph, which hinges 
almost entirely upon dreams. I suppose the child- 
ren would wish that he had written the whole Bible 
and will consider the great Elohist of the Book of 
Origins very stupid in comparison with him. His 
document and that of the Yahwehist are so run to- 
gether that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish 
them, but for the most part they are joined so clumsily, 
and so many contradictory passages are left standing 
side by side, that a careful critic can generally detect 
the lines of separation. 

The differences between the Yahwehist and the 
older Elohist are many, but their agreement is much 
more conspicuous, so that it was by no mere acci- 
x dent that they were ultimately fused together. 
They agree in being equally representative of the 
prophetic spirit and equally fond of rehearsing the 
legends of their race and their religion. The older 
Elohist is supposed to have been a native of North- 
ern Israel,* the Yahwehist of Judah. To them we 

* His elaboration of the Joseph story suggests this clearly enough, 
Joseph the father of Manasseh and Ephraim, the two great Northern 
tribes, was of course a Northern hero. 


IOO 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


are indebted for the legends of the patriarchs in 
their most picturesque and interesting forms, very 
different from the bald summaries of the Book of 
Origins which in the book of Chronicles degenerated 
into a mere list of names, “ Adam, Sheth, Enosh, 
Kenan,” and so on. We speak of the Yahwehist 
and older Elohist, but it is not probable that any 
one man did very much of the work necessary to 
the construction of these documents. They were 
not a manufacture, but a growth. The schools of 
the prophets were points of attraction around which 
songs and laws and legends naturally clustered. For 
a long time these were transmitted orally, receiving 
constant modifications and improvements, as more 
and more the ideal of the prophets was reflected 
back upon the nation’s past, and then, when in the 
course of the eighth century the prophets became 
writers, they began to write down the songs and 
laws and legends which they had inherited, and as 
they wrote they still kept on improving. And so it 
happened that in the course of the eighth century, 
B. C., the Yahwehistic and older Elohistic collections 
of legends were written down at different centres of 
prophetic enthusiasm, and afterwards joined togeth- 
er in a hap-hazard way, and the Book of Covenants 
was incorporated with them. And still the Penta- 
teuch was not half written, and of the so-called Law 
of Moses only a much smaller fraction. 

The literary outcome of such methods of trans- 
mission and development cannot, in any strict sense 
of the word, be spoken of as history. The Republic 
of Plato and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More are 


101 


THE LA W. 

hardly less historical than the prophetic portions of 
the Pentateuch. As those express the spiritual ideas 
of their writers, so do these. We saw in our last lec- 
ture how the Chronicler recast the history of the king- 
dom in the interest of his priestly theories and shall 
see the same phenomenon again to-night, in the com- 
position of the Book of Origins . But it must not be 
imagined that the priests monopolized the practice 
of recasting history in order that they might “hitch 
it to some useful end.” They did this more deliber- 
ately than the prophets, but hardly more efficient- 
ly. The spontaneous enthusiasm of the prophets 
stood them in as good stead as the calculating per- 
sistency of the priests. In the white heat of their 
devotion to the cause of Yahweh, the traditions of 
their people, laws and songs and legends, all became 
fluid and took on the shape of their ideal concep- 
tions. Moses and the patriarchs became the mouth- 
pieces of their zeal for Monotheism, their hatred of 
idolatry. They freely ascribed to them customs 
and ideas which were prevalent in the eighth cen- 
tury, B. C., but had not been before. But, fortun- 
ately for us they were so uncritical that they often 
left, imbedded in their work, fragments of older date 
which prove how subjective their methods ordin- 
arily were. A trout in the milk is no better circum- 
stantial evidence than many an archaic fragment 
which the various writers of the Pentateuch have left 
to guide us to the secret of their method of histori- 
cal composition. 

In the eighth century before Christ, the Pentateuch 
grew fast enough, but the Law very slowly, then 


102 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


or during the next century, until the reign of King 
Josiah. In Exodus XXXIV. there is an elaboration 
of certain portions of the Book of Covenants which 
the Yahwehist perhaps considered more important 
than the rest, and this was apparently the only addi- 
tion that the law received in any collective form 
until 621 B.C. In this year the temple needing certain 
repairs, Josiah having sent his scribe to Hilkiah the 
high priest,’ 5, on an errand relating to these repairs, 
he brings back a startling message from Hilkiah, 
“ I have found the Book of the Law in the house of 
Yahweh.” He also brings back the book which he 
has found and reads it to Josiah, upon whom it makes 
a deep impression, and he sets about to effect a 
sweeping reformation in accordance with the pre- 
cepts of the book. Everything connected with the 
worship of false gods is removed from the temple. 
In the vicinity of Jerusalem was the Topheth 
where children were sacrificed to Molech. It was 
defiled. On the Mount of Olives there were sanc- 
tuaries of Milcom, Chemosh and Ashtoreth dating 
from the time of Solomon and established by him. 
Even the altars dedicated to Yahweh were every- 
where defiled, for the Book of the Law which had 
been found in the temple declared that only in the 
temple at Jerusalem could sacrifice be acceptable to 
Yahweh. Josiah’s zeal extended even beyond the 
boundaries of his own kingdom to the Northern dis- 
tricts, in which the Assyrian power had become 
weakened by the rise of Babylon. 

What was this Book of the Law, the practice of 

* 2 Kings XXII, 3-7. 


THE LA IV. 


103 


which demanded such a thorough-going reformation ? 
I do not see how any intelligent and reasonable per- 
son can doubt that it was our present book of Deu- 
teronomy, not quite the whole of it, but IV., 44 to 
XXVIII., inclusive, leaving out Chapter XXVII. Moses 
himself is represented as the speaker but with the 
exception of fragments here and there it is evident 
that the book had come into existence only a short 
time previous to its discovery. The prophets after 
J osiah’s time frequently refer to it, while those before 
his time never refer to any such book. It could not 
have been written long before the time at which it 
appeared. Its doctrines and ideas are the doctrines 
and ideas of the priests and prophets of Josiah’s 
time. It was a manifesto of their wishes put 
into the mouth of Moses to express their sense of 
its importance and to give it an authority which 
otherwise it could not have possessed. 

The book of Deuteronomy was much mote of a 
manufacture than any previous portion of the Penta- 
teuch . Here calculation takes the place of sponta- 
neity. The Yahwehist and older Elohist had un- 
consciously allowed their predilections to determine 
their interpretations of the past, but the Deuterono- 
mist went about deliberately to invent a great his- 
toric fiction. He knew what he wanted ; namely, to 
abolish all idolatrous worship of Yahweh, all wor- 
ship of all other gods, and as a means to these ends 
to confine the worship of Yahweh to Jerusalem. 
His book was written to enforce these ideas, with 
the sanction of the greatest name in Hebrew history. 
The writer was tremendously in earnest ; his hatred 


104 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


of the false gods and the image-worship of Yahweh 
was immense ; but at the same time he was an 
artist and had an eye to dramatic effect. Choosing 
Moses for his mouth-piece, he represents him as 
calling the people together, in the fortieth year of 
their wanderings in the wilderness, to refresh their 
memory of the Law which had been previously re- 
vealed to them. Sternly commanding them to serve 
no other gods but Yahweh, he adjures them to ut- 
terly exterminate the Canaanites when they have 
come into their land. Rehearsing the “ ten words,” 
he makes the “ word ” forbidding any images of 
Yahweh much more explicit than it had ever been 
before. But he is still more emphatic in his prohi- 
bition of the worship of Yahweh at the various 
altars here and there throughout the country. He 
must be worshipped nowhere but in the temple at 
Jerusalem. And as there can be but one proper place 
of worship, so there can be but one proper tribe of 
priests, and this the tribe of Levi. The Levites who 
minister in the temple have fixed dues assigned to 
them, those scattered about the country are com- 
mended to the charity of the people. The three 
feasts, already mentioned in the Book of Covenants, 
are insisted on (unleavened bread, weeks, and taber- 
nacles), but he readjusts the eating of the passover 
to the feast of unleavened bread in such a way as 
to throw the dedication of the first born as much 
into the shade as possible, and give to the passover 
(which actually originated in the custom of human 
sacrifices to Yahweh, when he was a nature-god,) an 
historic explanation. The distinction of clean and 


THE LA W. 


105 


unclean had long been in vogue among the Israel- 
ites, but it had not appeared before in any popular 
code. Originally a natural distinction, the priests 
had taken it in hand and made it a religious one. 
Hence the injunction, — following the prohibition of 
unclean animals or those which had died a natural 
death — “ Thou shalt give the thing that dieth a 
natural death to the stranger that has settled among 
you, or thou mayest sell it to an alien for thou art 
an holy people unto Yahweh thy God” Mark well the 
reason. It is a perfect sample of the priestly ten- 
dency to substitute artificial and senseless for natural 
and rational grounds of conduct. 

But the Deuteronomist does not by any means 
confine himself to the outward forms and ceremon- 
ies of religion. His book abounds in precepts 
which are political and civil and domestic in their 
character, and many of these are very noteworthy 
for their moral excellence. A spirit of equity and 
clemency in some of his social regulations allies them 
to the teachings of Jesus more closely than any 
other portion of the Pentateuch. 

If I had time to take up the different portions of 
this wonderful composition, point after point, I 
could, I think, convince even the most skeptical 
that Moses was entirely innocent of all complicity 
in its publication, that it was the work of a religious 
reformer in the time of King Josiah, and was writ- 
ten to correct the abuses, and to fix the formal wor- 
ship of that time. The state of things it presupposes 
is always the state of things existent in Josiah’s 
reign. The command to utterly exterminate the 


1 06 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

Canaanites was only written with a view to making 
the worshippers of Yahweh intolerant of all 
Canaanitish practices. The Canaanites were not so 
exterminated. The representation to this effect in 
the first dozen chapters of Joshua is the Deuterono- 
mist’s own imaginary fulfilment of his own imagin- 
ary command. The book of Judges which is much 
more trustworthy on these points,* gives an entirely 
different impression. The image-worship of Yah- 
weh had been customary for hundreds of years at 
the time when Deuteronomy appeared, and the first 
feeling of its wrongfulness dates, not from Moses, 
but from the prophets of the eighth centuiy, B. C. 
So with the worship of Yahweh at various sanctu- 
aries. Not only was it customary up to this time, 
but it is expressly allowed in earlier portions of the 
Pentateuch . So with the Levitical priesthood. A 
preference for Levitical priests dates back as far as 
Solomon, and this preference increased until at 
length, we infer, the Deuteronomist did little more 
than formulate the custom of his time. That Moses 
expressly commanded any such Levitical function 
we have no particle of evidence. Prophecy and 
kingship claim the Deuteronomist’s attention to a 
large degree, and he was guided entirely by the phe- 
nomena of prophecy and kingship that were visible 
about him in the seventh century and by his knowl- 
edge of their past abuses. His portraiture of what 
a monarch should not be, is an almost photographic 
likeness of what Solomon really was. 


* Sec Second Lecture. 


THE LA W. 


10; 

Whether the writer of Deuteronomy was a priest 
or prophet we cannot say. In spirit he was both ; 
his book a compromise between the priestly and 
prophetic tendencies active in his time. Perhaps 
he was both in fact, as was his contemporary Jere- 
miah and his successor Ezekiel. But he was more 
prophet than priest. His prophetic fervor overtops 
his priestly formalism. And still his book was a 
great victory for the priestly tendency. Had not 
the captivity so soon succeeded, this tendency would 
have no doubt developed very rapidly, and less than 
one hundred instead of nearly two hundred years 
would have been sufficient to develop a priestly 
system as complete as that embodied in the Book 
of O rights. 

So much of Deuteronomy as was sent by Hilkiah 
to the king was the Deuteronomist’s contribution 
to the so-called Mosaic Law. But his contribution 
to the Pentateuch was more considerable, for appa- 
rently soon after his original publication, he wrote 
the introductory and closing chapters of our present 
book of Deuteronomy , and dressed up a little here 
and there the earlier Pentateuch documents, and 
fused his own with them. At the same time he 
wrote the opening chapters of the book of Joshua. 

And still the Pentateuch awaited an immense ac- 
cession to its priestly elements, an immense addL 
tion to its bulk.* That is, if we can trust the judg- 
ment of Kuenen and his school in regard to the 

* Of two hundred and ten chapters in the Pentateuch and Joshua, 
eighty belong to the Yahwehist and older Elohist, one hundred and 
twenty, — including the eighty of the Yahwehist and older Elohist — 
to the Deuteronomist, and ninety to the Booh of Origins. 


io8 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


date of the Book of Origins. According to Ewald, 
Deuteronomy was t;he last great addition to the 
Pentateuch. After the Deuteronomist came only a 
redactor, or editor, of the whole work. The Book 
of Origins , says this eminent critic, dates from the 
time of Solomon. But this theory, while it met 
with much acceptance, at the same time provoked 
considerable doubt ; it left unsolved so many prob- 
lems. The theory of Kuenen that the Book of Ori- 
gins dates from the fifth century, B. C., at first 
seems very revolutionary, but he did not reach it 
by any leap. The labors of other critics led up to it 
little by little. Graf, a Dutch critic of the first 
rank, impeached the integrity of the Book of Ori- 
gins, and while pushing forward its Levitical por- 
tions into the fifth century before Christ, assigned 
its narrative portions to some pre-exilic time. It 
only remained for Kuenen to re-assert the integrity 
of the book, within much the same limits assigned 
to it by Ewald, and to demonstrate that the whole 
was a production of the fifth century, B. c. Upon 
the statement of his grounds for this conclusion, 
Graf immediately accepted it, and simultaneously 
Dr. Zunz, of Berlin, a venerable and cautious 
scholar, arrived at the same conclusion. It is now 
generally accepted by liberal scholars in Holland, 
and is finding much acceptance in Germany and 
England. Notably the celebrated article of Prof. 
Robertson Smith in the Encyclopedia Britannica 
adopts this view, and in the last volume of Dean 
Stanley’s Jewish Church his sympathy with it is 
unmistakeable. 


THE LA W. 


109 


The question of the date and character of this 
document is one of first rate importance, the con- 
clusion of Kuenen is so utterly subversive of all 
popular conceptions of the Levitical law, which is 
supposed to have been announced by Moses, by 
divine suggestion, at the base of Sinai. For a com- 
plete discussion of the matter I must refer you to 
Kuenen’s Religion of Israel. If his reasoning is as 
convincing to you as it has been to me, his conclu- 
sions will command your willing and unqualified 
approval. 

The Book of Origins , as it now exists, begins with 
the first verse in Genesis , and runs in and out 
through all the other documents, not meddling 
much with Deuteronomy , up to the end of Joshua • 
It contains the first account of the creation and 
Adam’s family register, an account of the flood 
and Noah’s family register. It deals with the 
patriarchs much more summarily than do the earlier 
documents. In fact until the time of Moses the 
portions of this book are only introductory to the 
writer’s principal theme, which is the publication of 
the Levitical Law. The book of Leviticus is almost 
entirely his, and the larger part of Numbers. Here- 
in with parts of Exodus we have a sacerdotal code 
which marks an immense advance in priestly no- 
tions and pretensions on the book of Deuteronomy . 
Whenever it is necessary to his purpose, the writer 
freely recasts the history of the Mosaic and pre- 
Mosaic times. The tabernacle, which was in fact 
a simple tent, he represents as a very magnificent 
affair, and goes on chapter after chapter describing 


I TO 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


its details in the most careful manner. The resem- 
blance to Solomon’s temple is very close, and hence 
the popular idea that Solomon’s temple reproduced 
the arrangements of the tabernacle. In fact there 
was no such tabernacle as the Book of Origins de- 
scribes. The description is a reproduction of the 
temple of Solomon. In order to sanction the ex- 
clusiveness of the temple sacrifices which the Deu- 
teronomist had instituted, he asserts that the taber- 
nacle was the only place of sacrifice in the wilder- 
ness. In his scheme only the sons of Aaron can be 
priests, and he ascribes this regulation to Moses. 
But we have seen that the Deuteronomist allowed 
all Levites to be priests, and that the preference for 
even Levitical priests was of very gradual origin. 
Moreover we have in Ezekiel an account of how 
and why the other Levites were degraded, and the 
sons of Aaron made sole proprietors of the priestly 
function. Ezekiel is in fact of great service to us 
in determining the nature of the Book of Origins. 
The last eight chapters of his book are a sort of 
middle term between Deuteronomy and the Book of 
Origins. They never could have been written if he 
had known of any such sacerdotal law as that of the 
Book of Origins. Himself a priest, he would not 
have dared to publish an ideal conception of the 
hierarchy so foreign to the actual one if the concep- 
tion of the Book of Origins ever had been actual 
before his time. But Ezekiel is invaluable as re- 
vealing to us Israel during her period of gestation 
with the Levi tic law. His last eight chapters are 
the foetal child whose birth was signalized by the 


THE LA W. 


Ill 


publication of the Book of Origins by Ezra and Ne- 
hemiah. 

The Book of Origins is exceedingly minute in its 
regulations of the various sacrifices, and what is 
most important in these regulations is the careful 
provision that is made for the priests and Levites. 
These were dependent for their living on the temple 
offerings. In D outer onomy the claim for them is 
modest enough. Here it is so no longer. Extor- 
tionate demands are made for the support of the 
priests, the Levites and the temple servants. The 
latter now monopolize those portions of the sacri- 
fices which had previously been eaten by the wor- 
shipper with his family. And all of these provis- 
ions, so manifestly inspired by sacerdotal greed, are 
unblushingly declared to be inspired by Yahweh, 
and to have been spoken by his servant Moses. 

In the Book of Origins the ordinances of clean 
and unclean are much more elaborate than in the 
book of Deuteronomy. They are exceedingly min- 
ute and fanciful, and many of them evidently have 
their reason for existence in the disposition to still 
further increase the revenues and perquisites of the 
priestly office. The regulations of the festivals, 
also, are much more minute than they had been in 
previous codes. The passover, originally a private 
meal and celebrated at any time when children were 
eight days old, a reminiscence of ancient human 
sacrifices, was now made national and received a 
plausible historical explanation. Another day was 
added to the feast of Tabernacles, and every new 
moon was to have its feast-day, and in the seventh 


II 2 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


month was a great day of atonement. These lunai 
feasts were apparently concessions to the customs 
of the people which the priests despaired of being 
able to eradicate. Such feasts had long been dedi- 
cated to the Moon-goddess, Ashtoreth, and now 
without a word of explanation they were dedicated 
to Yahweh, in much the same way as the Roman 
Saturnalia was converted into Christmas. The 
author of the Book of Origins not only retained the 
Sabbath in his list of solemn days. He laid new 
stress upon it. He denounced the penalty of death 
against anyone who should fail to keep his regula- 
tions, and to strengthen his case he invented the 
story of a man who was stoned to death for gather- 
ing sticks upon the Sabbath. Instead of the sweet 
human reason given for observing the day in the 
Book of Covenants , he invents another, worthy of 
a sacerdotalist : that God rested on the seventh day 
from the creation of the world ! 

Such, all too briefly is the form and spirit of the 
Book of Origins or Elohistic document. It is a very 
different work from Deuteronomy ; infinitely less 
moral in its tone, infinitely more sacerdotal. There 
the priest was gaining on the prophet. Here he 
has left him out of sight. Go to it, yourselves, and 
see what an ado he makes about his mint, anise and 
cumin, and how little he has to say about the 
weightier matter of the Law, justice and mercy and 
righteousness. It is reading history backwards to 
suppose that this book was written before Ezekiel , 
or before Deuteronomy , and before the prophetic 
writings of the prophetic portions of the Pentateuch. 


THE LA IV. 


113 

Little by little all of these lead up to it. What is 
more rational than to suppose that Hebrew and Jew- 
ish literature had the same order of development as 
Hebrew and Jewish life. We know that in the life, 
free, spontaneous, prophetic elements preceded the 
formal, artificial, priestly elements. Does it not 
stand to reason that it was just the same in litera- 
ture ; that the increase of the sacerdotal spirit was 
the outcome of an increasingly sacerdotal life, and 
reacted upon the life to make it still more sacer- 
dotal ? That this was so in the historic literature of 
Israel no one thinks of doubting. Samuel and 
Kings are written in the prophetic spirit, Chronicles 
in the- priestly. So then, to assign the Book of 
Origins an earlier date than the other leading docu- 
ments of the Pentateuch , is not only to defy the 
analogy of Hebrew life, but also the analogy of 
Hebrew literature in those cases where we are ab- 
solutely certain of the order of development. 

The Book of Origins already incorporated with 
the remainder of the Pentateuch , minus a few priest- 
ly laws of still later origin was promulgated by Ezra 
and Nehemiah, at Jerusalem, in the year 445, B. C. 
Who had done this work of incorporation we do 
not know. Perhaps Ezra himself in the interval 
between his return to Jerusalem in 458, “ with 
the law of his God in his hand,” and the year when 
he and Nehemiah together published it. But the 
smoke of Sinai was not more impenetrable than the 
mystery which shrouds the development of the 
Book of Origins. That it was a development and 
not a sudden manufacture we have every reason to 


I 14 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

believe.* The last chapters of Ezekiel herald the 
coming of a time of priestly domination. But 
thirty-six years later, at the time of the return of 
the captives, the Deutero-Isaiah speaks in a voice 
which has the real prophetic ring, no priestly accent 
whatsoever. The returning captives were guided 
more by prophetic than by priestly enthusiasm. 
Their history is a blank for seventy years after the 
return, but could it all be known to us, it is doubt- 
ful if the development of the Book of Origins would 
be a part of it. Not Jerusalem, but Babylon, it is 
most likely, was the scene of this development. 
Cut off from actual participation in the temple rites, 
the captives there took refuge in an ideal sacerdotal- 
ism and hardly dared to hope for it a local habitation. 
To the faith and zeal of Ezra and Nehemiah we 
owe the realization of their sacerdotal dream. Not 
Sinai and the Wilderness, but Babylon and Jeru- 
salem witnessed the promulgation of the Levitical 
law. Its priest was Ezra, and not Aaron ; but who 
its Moses was the most patient study is not likely 
ever to reveal. The roar of Babylon does not give up 
its dead. 

If I have told aright the story of the Pentateuch, 
its gradual evolution, its combination out of various 
leading documents, some of which in turn combined 
still others and endorsed many existing practices, f 
it is a very different story from that which has been 
told for twenty centuries. It maybe hard to be- 

♦Two distinct portions at least are discernible. Ku enen’s Rel ig 
ion of Israel, II., p, no. 

f As do many regulations of the Book of Origins . 


THE LA W. 


”5 

lieve, but is it so hard as to believe that the Infinite 
God did really speak to Moses, and that Moses 
really saw him with his outward eyes, and that all 
the things recorded really happened ? Would it be \ 
hard at all to believe if we would not import our 
ideas of book-making into the pre-Christian cen- / 
turies. If the Pentateuch was such a growth as I ! 
have indicated, it was not exceptional. The book 
of Joshua was such another ; the books of Judges , 
Samuel , Kings , Isaiah , Zechariah, Job and Daniel 
all repeat the features which we have been noting. 1 
“ The Semitic genius,” says Prof. Robertson Smith, 

“ does not at all lie in the direction of organic struc- 
ture. In architecture, in poetry, in history, the He- 
brew adds part to part, instead of developing a sin- 
gle notion. The temple was an aggregation of small 
cells, the longest psalm is an acrostic ; and so the 
longest Biblical history is a stratification, and not 
an organism. The habit was facilitated by the 
habit of anonymous writing, and the accompanying 
lack of all notion of anything like copyright. If a 
man copied a book, it was his to add to and modify 
as he pleased, and he was not in the least bound to 
distinguish the old from the new. If he had two 
books before him to which he attached equal worth, 
he took large extracts from both, and harmonized 
them by such additions or modifications as he felt 
to be necessary.” * 

However distasteful to our preconceptions such 
plain truth as this may prove, and however subver- 
sive to any claim of special inspiration set up for the 

* Article “Bible” in Encyclopedia Britannica. 


1 1 6 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 

Bible, it is only by intrenching himself in ignorance 
and prejudice that a man can long fence himself 
against the conclusions of enlightened scholarship. 
So do not you. Open your gates. Go forth to 
meet the enemy with music and with flags, and you 
shall find he is no enemy : nay, but your dearest 
friend. 


FOURTH LECTURE. 

THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 

Let me again remind you that the Jewish division 
of the Old Testament is into the Law , the Prophets 
and the Writings . These three divisions do not so 
much correspond to the chronological order in which 
the different books which make them up were writ- 
ten as to the chronological order in which they were 
received into the Canon , or list, of those books which 
were considered worthy of a very special reverence 
and admiration. The first step in the formation of 
the Canon was signalized by the publication of the 
Pentateuch , in very nearly its present form, together 
with the book of Joshua , by Ezra and Nehemiah, in 
445, B. C. According to the book of Maccabees ,* the 
second step in the same direction was also taken 
by Nehemiah. He, it is said, founding a library, 
brought together, in addition to the Pentateuch and 
Joshua , “ the things concerning the kings and the 
prophets/’ that is the books of Judges and Samuel 
and Kings , the three major, and twelve minor proph- 
ets, “ and David’s things and letters from kings 
about offerings,” But this collection and addition 
made by Nehemiah does not correspond exactly to 
the second division of the Jewish Bible. It lacks 


* 2 Maccabees , II., 13. 


1 1 8 THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY. 

Joshua at the beginning, and has some of “ David’s 
things” at the end, and “ letters from [foreign] kings 
about offerings” to the temple, which have dropped 
out of the Canon altogether, though once esteemed 
as highly as the rest. In course of time it seems 
that Joshua was detached from the end of the Law, 
and made the beginning of the Prophets , and, still 
further along, the Psalms of David, his “ things,” as 
they are called, were detached from the Prophets , 
and made the beginning of the Writings. This was 
done all the more naturally because the Psalms at 
Nehemiah’s disposal did not correspond with our 
present book of Psalms, which is made up of five 
books, each one of which, it may be, corresponds 
to a separate date of collection. The Psalms col- 
lected by Nehemiah may have comprised only the 
first book, which concludes with the forty-first 
psalm, or the first with the second, which concludes 
with the seventy-second psalm, and with the words, 
“ Here end the Psalms of David, the son of Jesse/’ 
though in the following books there are various 
psalms ascribed to him. 

But when was the collection of the Writings 
made and added to the Canon ? According to the 
Maccabaean historian it was made by Judas Mac- 
cabaeus in the second century before Christ. Its 
original limits cannot be defined. For a century 
after the time of Judas Maccabasus there was a 
good deal of doubt and discussion about several 
books now included in the Writings, notably about 
Esther and Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. 
Some of the Psalms were hardly written in the time 


THE PSALMS AJVE OTHER WRITINGS. 1 19 

of Judas Maccabaeus, and the book of Daniel was so 
nearly contemporary with him that it must have 
had to wait a while after his time for its canonical 
distinction. However, not long before the advent 
of Jesus, the Writings , in their present bulk and 
number, must have been generally accepted as 
worthy additions to the Law and the Prophets , al- 
though at first their inspiration was not regarded 
as so perfect and imposing. 

The list of writings thus completed included some 
that we have already considered, Daniel and Lamen- 
tations , which I mentioned in my lecture on the 
prophets, Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles and Es- 
ther, which I mentioned in my lecture on the His- 
tories. There remain for us to consider this even- 
ing Psalms, Proverbs , Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solo- 
mon and the Book of Job. 

To make the book of Psalms the subject of crit- 
ical investigation seems hardly less a breach of 
natural piety than for a man “ to peep and botanize 
upon his mother’s grave.” They are that portion 
of the Old Testament, if not of the whole Bible, 
which has endeared it most to men of Christian 
faith. The ritual of both Jewjsh and Christian wor- 
ship has drawn upon them more largely than upon 
any other part of the Bible, than upon all the other 
parts together. In the fifth century, according to 
Theodoret, the majority of Christians knew them 
by heart, while knowing nothing of the remainder 
of the Bible. In the time of St. Ambrose, fourth 
century, as he himself informs us, when any other 
part of the Scriptures was read, the noisy talking of 


120 


ThE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


the congregation drowned the speaker’s voice, but 
the psalms were listened to in silence and with ad- 
miration. But their private far transcends their 
public use in spiritual significance. The personal 
and individual element in them is vastly more pre- 
dominant -than in any other portion of the Bible. 
Therefore the book of Psalms has been for more 
than twenty centuries the loved companion of the 
soul in sickness, in sorrow, in pain, in weariness, in 
ignominy and remorse, and scarcely less in all the 
various moods of spiritual joy and exaltation. 
Hardly could one imagine any shame or rapture 
of the private heart for which there is not in the 
Psalms some fit expression. Where, if not here, 
shall one look for an abundance of those 

“ Words which have drunk transcendent meaning up 

From the best passion of all bygone times ; 

Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse ; 

Sweet with all saint-hood, cleansed with martyr fires ” ? 

Doubtless there is much in them which has never 
served any good or useful purpose. Doubtless there 
is much that has been fuel to the flame of men’s 
malignant hate and bitterness. And doubtless 
much of all that seems to us in them most sweet 
and tender has been imported into them from time 
to time, and had no place in their original concep- 
tion. Take the expression, “ Cleanse*thou me from 
secret faults.” Who ever thinks, as he repeats it, 
of its original meaning, which was not faults secret 
from others , but unconscious violations of the law of 
ritualistic cleanness. And there are hundreds of 

verses in the Psalms whose meaning we uncon- 

« 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS . 12 1 

sciously idealize and alter in a similar manner. 
And still, take them for all in all, I cannot think 
that men have prized them over and above their 
worth, although they might have prized them with 
a good deal more intelligence and candor and dis- 
crimination. 

The Hebrew title of the whole collection is Songs 
of Praise. The Rabbins called it the Book of Hymns, 
a much truer appellation, for less than half of all are 
songs of praise. Our own title, the Psalms , is after 
the Vatican MS., and the Church of England Psalter 
after the Alexandrian.* Both of these titles are 
derived from the instrument that David is supposed 
to have used to play upon, or rather the second is 
the English name of it, and the first derivative. 

As printed in our English Bibles, each psalm has 
first an italicised heading, which is a sort of argu- 
ment of the psalm, and then a sub-heading in Ro- 
man letters. The italicized headings only date from 
the seven teen th century. They are as old as the 
King James’ translation. They are often misleading 
and absurd, and in the new translation of the Bible, 
which is being made in England, they will be either 
wholly stripped away, or thoroughly amended. How 
and when the subheadings originated, it is impossi- 
ble to discover. The mere apologist contends that 
they are as ancient as the psalms to which they are 
attached. But the drift of criticism is towards the 
conclusion that the most of them originated long 
after, some of them hundreds of years ; that so far 

* Two of the three earliest MSS. of the New Testament, and por- 
tions of the Old. 


122 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


as they are historical, they are purely conjectural, 
and generally fanciful. Many of them, however, 
are directions for the musical accompaniment, 
expressed in terms which modern criticism tries in 
vain to fathom. The forty-seventh psalm affords a 
good example of these different headings. The ital- 
icized heading reads, “The nations are exhorted 
cheerfully to entertain the Kingdom of Christ.” 
What sort of spectacles enabled the seventeenth 
century divines to find anything about the King- 
dom of Christ in this psalm will always be a mys- 
tery. The sub-heading of this psalm reads, “ To the 
Chief Musician. A Song for the Sons of Korah.” 
For the best understanding of the psalms all these 
headings and sub-headings are superfluous, and 
should be entirely disregarded. Even those sub- 
headings which ascribe the authorship of the 
psalms to David, or some other person, should 
have no weight compared with the internal evidence. 

The same lack of critical judgment which char- 
acterizes the Prophets and the Pcntate7ich , is emi- 
nently characteristic of the Psalms. Some of them 
have been broken in two. Others are made up of 
two or more incongruous fragments. The nine- 
teenth is a good example. The first part of it, be- 
ginning, “ The heavens declare the glory of God,” 
is a magnificent poem of nature, such as an eighth 
century prophet might have written. The second 
part beginning, “ The law of the Lord is perfect,” 
is a glorification of the ritual law, dating from Ez- 
ra’s time or later. The fourteenth psalm is a dupli- 
cate of the fifty-third, and parts of various psalms 


THE PSALMS A HD OTHER WRITINGS. 1 23 

reappear in others. Quite a number of the psalms 
are alphabetical in their poetic form. Each verse 
in the original begins with a letter of the alphabet, 
till all be gone over, as in Psalm XXV. Sometimes each 
half verse begins with a different letter. But these 
psalms are seldom perfect. A letter here and there 
has been dropped out. All of these things go to 
show what vicissitudes of careless transmission and 
transcription the psalms encountered on their way 
to a canonical authority. 

A word concerning their poetic forms. These 
vary much between the extremes of spontaneity 
and artificiality. The alphabetical psalms are of 
course extremely artificial. An interesting group 
of psalms are those called Songs of Degrees. There 
are fifteen of them in all (cxx. — CXXXIV.) The 
most reasonable theory concerning them is that 
they were pilgrim songs, sung by the people of 
the caravans going up to Jerusalem to keep the 
various feasts. The rhythm of Hebrew poetry is 
not a rhythm of quantity, but a rhythm of sense. 
Even where the number of syllables is the same 
in corresponding lines, the quantity is very seldom 
equal. The term parallelism is generally used to 
indicate the Hebrew rhythm. Its two principal 
methods are those of opposition and similarity. 
Often the parallel members are perfectly synony- 
mous. Take the expression, quoted in the New 
Testament from the prophets, “ He shall come rid- 
ing upon an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an 
ass.” Strangely enough the New Testament in- 
terprets this as meaning an ass and colt, and repre- 


124 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


sents Jesus as sending for the two animals. But 
in its original connection the “ colt, the foal of an 
ass,” is simply the synonymous poetic parallel of 
the ass already mentioned, and only one animal is 
intended. “ Sweeter than honey and the honey- 
comb” is another case in point. For the parallelism 
of opposition take 

“For His anger endureth for a moment, 

But His favqj through life. 

In the evening sorrow may be a guest, 

But joy cometh in the morning.” 

Sometimes the parallelism is double. Sometimes 
each member marks an advance in thought upon 
the previous member. In one way and another 
this rhythm of sense is capable of being varied in 
a good many ways. It is the distinguishing mark 
of Hebrew poetry, and as such is characteristic of 
the Psalms , the Proverbs , Job, the Song of Solomon , 
the Prophets , with some exceptions*, together with 
many fragments imbedded in the Pentateuch and in 
the Histories. 

There are one hundred and fifty psalms in all. 
Of these forty-eight are anonymous ; seventy-three 
are ascribed to David ; twelve to Asaph, the chief 
of David’s choir ; eleven to the sons of Korah, con- 
temporaries of David , two to Solomon, and one 
to Moses. In this enumeration the forty-second 
and forty-third are counted as one psalm, as any 
one can see they ought to be. 

Our principal interest in this enumeration attaches 

* All of Daniel , and parts of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS • 1 25 

to the preponderance assigned to David — seventy- 
three psalms. And there have always been critics 
ready to claim and argue that a large majority of 
the anonymous psalms were also written by David. 
Indeed there have been critics who have set aside 
th^ twenty-nine titles ascribing psalms to Asaph, 
Solomon and others, and have contended that the 
book of Psalms was written by David from the be- 
ginning to the end. The oppose extreme of this 
conclusion has been reached by Kuenen and his 
school, namely, that we cannot safely predicate of 
a single psalm that it was written by David, and 
that the chances are that not a single one was writ- 
ten by him. I need not say that this position is a 
thousand times more reasonable than the opposite 
extreme, but the majority of critics range them- 
selves between these two positions, the mere apolo- 
gists verging to the Davidic side, the scientific crit- 
ics to the other. Prof. Robertson Smith, to whom 
I have frequently referred in these lectures, in his 
article on the Bible in the Encyclopedia Britannica , 
says : “ The assertion that no psalm is certainly 
David’s is hyperskeptical but when he would 
enumerate those which he regards as certainly Da- 
vidic, he is obliged to stop short at the eighteenth 
and the seventh. There is little enough in the 
spirit of the eighteenth to prevent our assigning it 
to David, seeing that Dean Stanley writes : “ When 
Clovis fed his savage spirit from the eighteenth 
psalm, it was, we must confess, because he found 
there the sparks of a kindred soul.” Ewald is a 
critic whose natural disposition is to hold on to as 


I 26 the BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

much as passible of what has been received, and he 
attributes to David only fifteen psalms in all. The 
argument of Kuenen for the non-Davidic author- 
ship of the entire collection is based upon our 
knowledge of the character of David and his time, 
compared with the historic and religious implica- 
tions and teachings of the psalms. Let us remind 
ourselves, very briefly, what the character of David 
actually was, and ^vhat sort of religion was illus- 
trated by the practice of his life. We have really 
three accounts of David, one in the Chronicles 9 
which is hardly worth attending to ; two in Samuel r 
one, as it were, inside the other. That is, we have 
a set of legends imbedded in a prophetic* idealiza- 
tion. It is evident that we get nearest David in 
the legends. Drawing out our conclusions from 
these legends, we find that David was a man of 
splendid force and courage ; that he followed up 
successfully the work of Saul in consolidating the 
wrangling tribes into a single nation ; that he could 
love as passionately as he could hate, and did love 
his children and a few others with a great affection. 
But for all his physical courage, he was smitten 
through and through with moral cowardice. One 
of the most cunning, he was also one of the most 
treacherous of men, and one of the most cruel. He 
put the captive Ammonites “ under saws and under 
harrows of iron and under axes of iron, and made 
them to pass through the brick kiln,” that is roasted 
them alive. “ And thus did he unto all the cities 
of the Ammonites.” Joab, who had 'fought his 

* Deuteronomic might be a tetter word. 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 127 


hardest battles for him, and done his dirtiest work, 
he hated, and yet feared, and so, himself afraid to 
strike at him, arranged his murder on his dying bed. 
This man had all the vices of a Herod and a Henry 
Eighth. He was as licentious as he was murderous 
and cruel. “ A man after God’s own heart,” was 
he ? “ After Yahweh’s own heart,” the text should 

read, and this he was, his Yahweh being such a god 
as such a man would naturally ^onceive. 

As for his religion, it was not even the best re- 
ligion of his time. Samuel and others had arrived 
at the exclusive worship of Yahweh. But David 
apparently worshipped Baal also, and named one 
of his sons Baal-jada. He had a domestic teraphim , 
or idol, which he worshipped. And what was his 
conception of Yahweh? As a god whom he could 
not worship outside of Canaan. As a god whom 
he could appease by letting him “ smell a burnt 
offering;” a god who could delight in human sacri- 
fice. You have not forgotten that terrible picture 
at the Centennial of Rizpah defending the corpses 
of Saul’s seven sons against the wild beasts and the 
vultures. That was a picture of King David’s wor- 
ship of Yahweh. Those frightful corpses were a 
sacrifice which he had offered to his god in time of 
famine. 

It is only possible to think of David as the author 
of any number of the psalms by forming our idea 
of the man and his religion from the psalms them- 
selves, a manifest begging of the question. Such a 
man as he actually was, with such a religion as he 
practiced, could have written but a very few, if any, 


128 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


of the psalms that have come down to us. Some 
of them are harsh and cruel and vindictive enough 
to be his, but they have other marks, which prove 
a later origin. This is the general argument. Then 
taking up one by one the three and seventy psalms 
ascribed to David, it is found that almost without 
exception they betray a situation very different 
from his, and a religion of a much higher order : 
conceptions of Yalweh, of the worship appropriate 
to him, of his relation to nature and to Israel, and 
to other gods, such as no one in David’s time had 
reached. Take the fifty-first psalm. It is ascribed 
to David on the occasion of Nathan’s rebuking him 
for his sin with Bathsheba. But it contains a spir- 
itual doctrine that David never could have antici- 
pated, and its closing verses “ Show favor to Zion ; 
build up Jerusalem’s wall,” indicate the time of the 
captivity, or after, when the walls of the city had 
been broken down. Very likely these closing verses 
were stuck on at a later period, but the remainder 
of the psalm is a sufficient argument, and in almost 
every case the psalms ascribed to David are as evi- 
dently as this of later origin. 

It is easy to discover how it came to be supposed 
that David was the author of so many of the psalms. 
The tendency of the post-exilic times was to single 
out individuals distinguished in certain departments 
of thought and life, and ascribe to them all, or nearly 
all, that had been accomplished in those depart- 
ments. Thus to Moses was ascribed all of the legal 
literature ; to Solomon all of the proverbial, and to 
David and his choristers a majority of the psalms. 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 120 

The Chronicler idealized David, and made him 
the founder of the temple service in all its full- 
ness and perfection. In the same spirit the psalms, 
which were “ the hymn-book of the second temple,” 
were naturally ascribed to him who was regarded as 
the founder of its service. A nucleus was furnished 
for this conception in the fact that David was actu- 
ally fond of music, and was a composer of songs. 
But his songs, we have reason to believe, were songs 
of war and love and wine, not psalms of praise and 
hymns of shame and sorrow. The first mention 
made of David as a singer or musician is by Amos,* 
in the eighth century, B. c., and it is by no means 
flattering, for he is there associated with a disre- 
putable set of merry-makers, who were “ not grieved 
for the affliction of Joseph.f” Without then being 
dogmatic, it may safely be asserted that nothing 
that is purest and best in the Psalter can properly 
be ascribed to David. If any part of it is his, it is, 
beyond a doubt, that part which has for us the least 
significance of help or consolation. 

Besides the seventy-three psalms ascribed to 
David in their titles, there are twenty-nine others 
which have definite ascriptions ; twenty-six to Da- 
vid’s contemporaries, two to Solomon, and one to 
Moses. These titles are as little to be trusted as 
the Davidic. In form and spirit those of Asaph 
and the Sons of Korah belong to a period much 
later than David’s; the most of them to a period 
subsequent to the captivity. The psalms ascribed 

*Amos, VI., 4 , 5 , 6 . 

f The Northern Kingdom. 


130 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


to Solomon are certainly not his. The psalm as- 
cribed to Moses is the ninetieth. The Talmudic 
writers ascribe to him ten others, with as much 
reason, that is, with none at all. The forty-eight 
anonymous psalms have been ascribed to various 
authors, but with no better ground than vague con- 
jecture. The wisest course is to abandon altogether 
the attempt to fix the authorship of these or any. 
The most that can be wisely done is to determine, 
in a general way, the periods of their composition. 
This we can often do with tolerable certainty. 
The prophetic enthusiasm of the eighth century, 
B. c. ; the sorrows of the faithful in the idolatrous 
reign of Manasseh ; the shame and confusion ensu- 
ing on the downfall of Josiah, soon followed by the 
captivity ; the gloom and misery of the Babylonian 
exile ; the joy of the return ; the delight in the re- 
juvenated service of the temple, and, more than 
possibly, the fiery ardors of the Maccabaean genera- 
tion — all these have left their traces on the psalms 
indelibly impressed. The highest thought which 
they embody, and, with very few exceptions, the 
earliest, is that of the eighth century prophets : 
their thought of Yahweh as the only God, delight- 
ing not in sacrifices, but in righteousness. Suppos- 
ing, as even Calvin did, that some of the psalms 
date from the Maccabaean period (second century, 
B. C.), and allowing some of them to be Davidic 
(but this more doubtfully), the formation of the 
entire collection would cover a period of 900 years, 
a period long enough to include a great diversity of 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 3 1 

authorship and of religious teachings.* Whoevef 
wrote them, they contain sentences which for a 
thousand years to come will echo to men’s deepest 
shame and highest aspiration. . 

Consider next the book of Proverbs . u The 
proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of 
Israel,” reads the first verse, and hence the popular 
conception that the whole book was the fruit of 
Solomon’s proverbial philosophy. But the book 
assigns the thirtieth chapter to a certain Agur, 
the son of Jakeh, and part at least of the thirty- 
first chapter to Lemuel’s mother. The remainder 
is ascribed to Solomon at the beginning and else- 
where in the text. The book, considered as a 
whole, is evidently made up of various separate 
fragments, Solomonic or otherwise remains to be 
seen. Thus, after six introductory verses in the 
first chapter, we have a discourse proceeding from 
the seventh verse to the end of the ninth chapter. 
This part of the book is not really a collection of 
proverbs, but a continuous discourse. “ It is a very 
earnest exhortation to a moral life; a warning 
against murder, theft, contentiousness, dishonesty, 
sloth, and above all, unchastity and adultery.” At 
chapter X. there is a new start, announced as such 
by the words, “ The proverbs of Solomon.” The 
fragment thus began continues to chapter XXII., 17 . 
It is the most important fragment in the book; the 
longest and the most genuinely proverbial. A 
third fragment begins with a separate introduction 

* To “the Scribes,” of whom the Christian believer commonly 
thinks only hard things, we are indebted for their preservation. 


232 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


at XXII., 1 7, and continues to the end of chapter 
XXIV. Chapters XXV. to XXIX. constitute still an- 
other fragment. It begins, “These are also the 
proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah, 
king of Judah, copied out.’’ Chapters XXX. and 
XXXI. constitute another fragment, made up of three 
lesser fragments : the words of Agur, the prophecy 
which Lemuel’s mother taught him, and the de 
scription of a good wife which Doderlein has called 
“the golden A B C for wives/’ and Henry, “the 
looking-glass for ladies.” It is an alphabetical 
poem and hence Doderlein’s name for it. 

The variety of literary workmanship in the differ- 
ent fragments forbids the supposition that they are 
all the product of a single pen. The poetic paral- 
lelism is very different in the first and second frag- 
ments. But if the whole cannot be Solomonic, 
which fragment, if any, can safely be regarded so ? 
Not the first, say Davidson and Kuenen, and many 
other critics. This is the part which is not so prov- 
erbial as the others, but is a continuous discourse. 
Besides the Prophets and the priests and hymn- 
writers, many of whom were either priests or proph- 
ets, there was from the time of Solomon a class of 
thinkers or writers spoken of as wise-men or sages. 
Solomon himself was one of these. But apparently 
his chokmah or Wisdom was but little more reli- 
gious than David’s psalmody. It consisted in such 
shrewd practical judgments as that reported in 
Kings , (i, III., 16-28), in some fanciful knowledge of 
plants and animals, and on the giving and solving 
of riddles, some of them possibly of an ethical 


THE PSALMS A HD OTHER WRITINGS. I 33 

character. The first section of the proverbs was 
written by a sage, but by a sage who lived in the 
seventh century, B. C., four hundred years after 
the time of Solomon, when the sages who at first 
had been rather anti-religious or unreligious had 
become zealous adherents of Yahweh and his wor- 
ship. Religion, by growing less fanatical and more 
moral, gradually enlisted the sympathy of the sages 
who, in their turn, were growing less fanciful and 
more moral ; less fond of riddles, and more fond of 
righteousness. The book of Proverbs as we have it 
is the outcome of this compromise between the 
sages and the prophets of Yahweh. In the first 
section we have the finest fruit born of this mar- 
riage, a beautiful discourse which celebrates the 
moral service of Yahweh, written, as I have said, in 
the seventh century, B. C., not long before the book 
of Deuteronomy. The next and longest section pre- 
sents us with an earlier aspect of the same develop- 
ment. In this part and the succeeding we have 
simple lessons of a not very lofty prudential moral- 
ity, all in the interest of the Yahwehism of the 
prophets on their moral side, but with less positive 
enthusiasm for Yahwehism than is displayed by the 
first section. Here and there throughout these 
sections it may be that we have a few proverbs 
which in their original form date from the time of 
Solomon, and from the great king himself. For 
there are some that very possibly were originally 
propounded in the form of riddles. But this is 
vague conjecture. That any of the Proverbs came 
from Solomon we cannot say for certain. That but 


*34 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


a few can date from him is clear as day. The prin- 
cipal fragments of the book were written in the 
eighth and seventh centuries, B. C., and the book as- 
sumed its present form soon after the return from 
Babylon. If its Solomonic origin had been accepted 
in Ezra’s time, we may be sure that “ Solomon’s 
things ” as well as “ David’s things ” would have 
been included by Nehemiah in his library of pre- 
cious books. 

The book of Proverbs is followed in the Old Testa- 
ment by a book called Ecclesiastes , or The Preacher , 
Ecclesiastes being the Greek word for preacher, as 
Ecclesiasticus , which we shall encounter in the 
Apocrypha, is the Latin. By the preacher Solomon 
is manifestly intended. The book begins, “ The 
words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King in 
Jerusalem,” and as it proceeds, the attempt to indi- 
cate the character of Solomon is unmistakable. It 
may be doubted whether the writer really meant to 
pass himself off for the wise king. Possibly he only 
meant to make him the literary impersonation of 
his thought. But the habits of his time suggest a 
different explanation. It was the order of the day 
to secure additional prestige for laws and psalms 
and prophecies, by ascribing them to Moses and 
David and distinguished prophets. In Ecclesiastes 
we have, most likely, another instance of this favor- 
ite custom. Whichever way it was, the impersona- 
tion of Solomon by its author was a stroke of won- 
derful good fortune. It has preserved his book for 
more than two thousand years. There was much 
hesitation in regard to its admission to the list of 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 35 

precious books, because of the manifest coldness 
towards the Temple and the Law, and its various 
skeptical, epicurean tendencies. But its pretence of 
Solomonic origin, the worthlessness of which could 
not be made apparent at a time when criticism was 
a wholly undiscovered art, finally overbore all scru- 
ples. And so an interesting book was saved from 
threatening oblivion, to be the battle-ground of 
critics and the confusion of believers. 

I have taken for granted that the author of Eccle- 
siastes was not Solomon. No critic of respectable 
intelligence and candor would disagree with me in 
this particular. It is a difficult matter for a writer 
even with the utmost care, to reproduce the form 
and spirit of a by-gone time. A recent historical 
novelist * anticipated the musical activity of Cheru- 
bini and Beethoven fifty or sixty years. Thackeray’s 
Henry Esmond was a very careful attempt to repro- 
duce the form and spirit of the age of Anne, and yet 
the critics have detected some surprising incongrui- 
ties. But the writer of Ecclesiastes did not go to 
work carefully and reproduce the form and spirit of 
the time of Solomon. Once having chosen the name 
of Solcynon and a few of his more striking char- 
acteristics, as traditionally known, he went on to 
freely express himself in forms of thought and 
speech that would have been impossible for any 
writer in the time of Solomon. The very first verse 
betrays his secret: “ King in Jerusalem and the 
twelfth more openly, “ I, the preacher, was King 
over Israel in Jerusalem.” Solomon could never 

* Mrs. Alexander in her Hentage of Lang dak. 


136 THE BIBLE OF TO DAY. 

have written of his kingship in the past tense, or 
have specified Jerusalem at a time when there was 
no king anywhere else. Fancy Solomon writing, 
“ I have gotten more wisdom than all that were be- 
fore me.” But he would have been much less likely 
to write in condemnation of his own injustice and 
oppression. The part of Solomon is not well sus- 
tained. The writer is continually forgetting him- 
self, and writing in his own proper person as a critic 
of the rulers of his time. The time of Solomon was 
a time of splendor and success ; the writer’s time, a 
time of the opposite character. And once there 
pops out an allusion to Judea as the “ province ; ” 
whether of Persia or the Seleucidae is not specified. 
The ideas of God are more advanced than those of 
Solomon’s time, or than the prophets’. The word 
Elohim is used for the Deity exclusively, as it did 
not come to be till after Ezra’s time, when Yahweh 
became the ineffable name. The character of the 
Hebrew, abounding in Chaldaisms, that is, forms of 
speech contracted in Babylon, and most resembling 
the Hebrew of Daniel, and the decay of the poetic 
forms, are other arguments which have great weight 
with those who can appreciate their force# The 
exact date of the author I shall not endeavor to de- 
termine. Ewald and Davidson say, 325 B. C., seven 
hundred years after the accession of Solomon to 
the throne of David. Kuenen, Oort and others 
put him a century later; about 225 B. C. The 
writer was evidently one whom the service of the 
temple and the refinements of the scribes upon the 
Law no longer satisfied. 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 37 

Ecclesiastes has been called by some one whom I 
cannot now recall, “ the saddest of all sad books.” 
I think I have read sadder books than this, but 
certainly this is not a merry one. That it has no 
faith in any other life than this is not its gloomiest 
trait. It has no faith in this. Skeptical, epicurean, 
pessimistic : these are the adjectives that best de- 
scribe its quality. And it is skeptical in the true 
sense of the word. Dogmatic denial is no more 
skepticism than dogmatic affirmation. Voltaire was 
not a whit more skeptical than Calvin. The skep- 
tic is the man who is not sure of anything, the man 
whose conclusions are all infected with an element 
of doubt. Skepticism? — 

“ It is the rift within the lover’s lute, 

, Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit 

Which rotting inward slowly moulders all.” 

It is this quality in Ecclesiastes which has given a 
certain color of likelihood to the criticism which has 
been frequently made upon it : that it is made up 
of two incongruous fragments, one skeptical, the 
other conventionally orthodox. “ Good God ! ” 
alternates with “ Good devil ! ” all the way along. 
The waiter has an undisguised contempt for the 
popular religion, but so had Socrates, who, dying, 
orders Crito to sacrifice a cock to Esculapius. It is 
better to be on the safe side. So I was reading in 
a Baptist paper the other day, “ If the doctrine of 
Eternal Hell is ever so doubtful, you’d better be- 
lieve it. For if it should happen to be true you 
would be all right, and if it should not, you would 
be no worse off for having believed it.” This is 


\ 


133 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


the spirit of Ecclesiastes . There is a God. Yes, 
pretty certainly, but “ God is in Heaven and thou art 
upon Earth, therefore let thy words be few.” He 
is remote and inaccessible to praise and prayer. 
“Fear God and keep his commandments.” Yes, he 
advises this, but also, “ Be not righteous overmuch, 
neither make thyself over-wise. Why shouldst thou 
destroy thyself?” On the other hand, “Be not 
over-wicked, and be not foolish. Why shouldst 
thou die before thy time?” This is the character- 
istic tone. It has no enthusiasm, no elevation. 
The piety is without warmth. The morals are the 
coldest prudence. Nothing is certain, but let us 
keep an eye to windward. 

As I have used the word skeptical advisedly, so 
would I use the word epicurean. It does not mean 
coarse and beastly, indulgent to excess, given over- 
much to sensual pleasures. It is “ the doctrine of 
the mean,” the middle way between extremes of 
poverty and riches, ignorance and wisdom. “There 
is nothing better,” says the Preacher, “ than for a 
man to eat and drink, and that he should make his 
soul enjoy the good of all his labor. There is 
nothing better than that a man should rejoice in 
his own works ; for that is his portion ; for who 
shall bring him to see what shall be after him. 
Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no 
better thing to do under the sun than to eat and 
drink and be merry.” At the same time remember 
that excess is apt to dull the edge of appetite. 

But the Preacher is not more epicurean than he 
is pessimistic. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 139 

is his perpetually recurring cry. Tc enjoy life is 
the only wisdom, but even this is folly. “ I saw ” 
he says “ that the race was not to the swift, nor the 
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, 
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet 
favor to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth 
to them all. Wherefore I praised the dead which 
are already dead, more than the living which are 
yet alive. Yea, better is he who hath not yet been 
than both.” In his pessimism he is an utter fatal- 
ist. “ Consider the work of God ; who can make 
straight what he hath made crooked. There is one 
event to the righteous and the wicked ; to the clean 
and unclean. There is a time for everything;” 
that is, a time fixed beforehand. Men are the pup- 
pets of a power behind the scenes. 

It has been a very pretty piece of business for 
the apologists to make a book of this sort fit in 
with their conceptions of religion. For special 
combats it has furnished a whole armory of texts. 
“The heart of the sons of men is full of evil:” there 
is one for the protagonists of total depravity. And 
there is pigment here to paint the world as black 
as any Calvinist could wish. On the other hand, 
there are sweet morsels for the Universalists : “All 
things come alike to all. There is one event to the 
righteous and the wicked. As is the good so is the 
sinner.” Only the moment that we go behind 
these words we find that the equality they predi- 
cate is one of everlasting, joyless death, not one of 
everlasting life and happiness. And whatever wea- 
pons there are here for special controversies, the 


140 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


spirit of the whole is dreadfully at variance with 
any elevated form of Christianity. But your thor- 
ough-going apologist is never at a loss for explana- 
tions. The object of Ecclesiastes, he informs us, is 
to compel us to infer the doctrine of another life 
from the futility of all enjoyment here. Stranger 
than this is the conceit that the purpose of Ecclesi- 
astes is to teach explicitly the doctrine of a future 
life. The strongest text for this position is that 
which has been graven as a motto over the entrance 
to Mount Auburn, “ Then shall the dust return to 
the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to 
God who gave it.” But what this text asserts is 
just the opposite of immortality, as every critic 
knows who is not consciously or unconsciously a 
special pleader. What it asserts is the absorption 
of the individual in God, the annihilation of all indi- 
vidual existence. Interpreting, as we are bound to 
do, the more by the less obscure statement, we 
must interpret this by chapter III., verses‘19 and 20. 
“ For that which befalleth the sons of man befalleth 
beasts ; even one thing befalleth them ; as the one 
dieth so dieth the other. Yea, they have all one 
breath : so that a man hath no preeminence above 
a beast ; for all is vanity.” Read in the light of 
these clear-shining words, the motto of Mount Au- 
burn is a denial of any personal immortality. 

We have still another book in the Old Testament 
ascribed to Solomon. “ The Song of Songs, which 
is Solomon’s,” reads the first verse. But this is prob- 
ably the grossest instance that we have of the ten 
dency to ascribe books to those who figure most 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 141 

conspicuously in them, as the books of the Penta- 
teuch to Moses ; the book of Joshua to Joshua, and 
so on. This Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs , 
or Canticles , as it is indifferently called, has had 
perhaps the most remarkable history of any book 
in the Old Testament. There are fragments in the 
Bible of older date, such as the Song of Deborah , 
and, possibly, individual psalms, but as an entire 
book this is undoubtedly the oldest in the Old 
Testament collection. “ First that which is nat- 
ural/’ as Paul said, “ and afterward that which is 
spiritual,” for I shall assume that the book is “ nat- 
ural,” and was at first regarded so, and rescued 
from oblivion by men’s admiration for it simply as 
a poem of love and faithfulness. The title, the 
Song of Songs, which is Solomon's , could not have 
been a part of the original poem. If it had been, 
we may be sure that Nehemiah* would have in- 
cluded this also in his library of precious books. 
But, though written late in the ninth, or early in 
the eighth century, even if attributed to Solomon, 
the claim could not have been allowed until the 
system of allegorical interpretation had arisen. It 
was received into the Canon in the first or second 
century, B. C., and at this time its Solomonic au- 
thorship and its allegorical character were both al- 
lowed, no doubt. “ Unless the book were ascribed 
to Solomon, it is not likely that it would have been 
received into the Canon, and except for its allegori- 
cal interpretation at the time when the Canon was 

* He might have found in it a capital argument against foreign 
marriages. 


142 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


fixed, it probably would not have been ascribed to 
Solomon.” Once admitted into the list of precious, 
which soon became the list of sacred, books, it soon 
became a great favorite with the Rabbinical exposi-' 
tors. It was supposed to figure forth the relation 
of Yahweh and his people Israel. This relation 
had often been set forth in the similitude of a faith- 
ful husband and a faithless wife. But here the wife 
was represented as altogether faithful. Rabbi Akiba 
said : “ The whole world is not worth the day on 
which the Canticle was given to Israel. All the 
writings of the Canon are holy, but the Canticle is 
the most holy of holies.” But persons under thirty 
were prohibited from reading it ; not, we are assured, 
on account of its sensuous imagery, but on account 
of its theological profundity. Origen, the greatest 
Christian scholar of the second century, was a firm 
believer in the double sense of Scripture, and he set 
the fashion for the allegorical Christian interpreta- 
tion of the Song of Solomon , which has been the 
most common ever since, and which the chapter 
headings and running titles in our English Bible, 
dating from the seventeenth century, tend to per- 
petuate indefinitely. According to these the Shu- 
lamite maiden of the poem is the Church, and her 
lover is Christ. Here are the headings of the first 
chapter, “ The Church’s love unto Christ. She 
confesseth her deformity [I am black but comely] 
and prayeth to be directed to his flock. Christ di- 
recteth her to the Shepherd’s tents, and showing 
his love to her, giveth her gracious promises. The 
Church and Christ congratulate one another.” 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 43 

And so on for seven chapters. But from the earli- 
est dawn of modern criticism the interpretation of 
the book has varied in a hundred different ways, 
tending more and more away from the allegorical 
method, and getting more and more rational and 
sensible. Prof. Stuart thought the book an alle- 
gory representing the love of Christ, not for the 
Church, but for the individual soul, and it has fre- 
quently been regarded in this light, which is, it 
seems to me, the most disgusting possible. Scien- 
tific criticism has but one opinion, and that a very 
simple one, viz., that the book is a poem of the 
natural human love of a young girl for a shepherd 
lad, whom she has just espoused. Solomon desires 
to add her to the number of his wives, and to make 
her his greatest favorite. To this end she is plied 
with flatteries and entreaties. The other women 
join with Solomon to persuade her to remain with 
them. But it is all without avail. Her virtue and 
her love are an impregnable fortress, and in despair 
of making her more docile, Solomon at length con- 
sents to her return to her more humble and more 
virtuous lover. The poem is dramatic in its form. 
The Semitic mind was never master of this form of 
poetry. But this is the nearest approach we have 
to it in ancient Jewish literature. The book of Job 
comes next, but that is hardly more than dialogue. 
The limits of the different scenes and speakers have 
been determined by the ablest critics with much 
unanimity. Dr. Noyes has well said, that if the 
book were anywhere but in the Bible, no one would 
have a moment’s hesitation in deciding on its char- 


144 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


acter. The book was never written that carried its 
meaning on its face more obviously than this. The 
heroine’s nose is compared in the text to “ the 
tower of Lebanon, which looketh towards Damas- 
cus a prominent feature in a beautiful landscape. 
The central idea of the book is just as prominent, 
and has its beautiful surroundings. 

As for the authorship of Solomon, it is hardly 
worth considering. On any theory of interpreta- 
tion, natural or allegorical, it is equally impossible. 
He would have been the last man to write a drama 
celebrating the purity and faithfulness of a maiden 
whom he had tried in vain to add to his seraglio. 
And how absurd to think that he would make him- 
self in an allegory the impersonation of the idola- 
trous enemies of Israel’s righteousness and peace. 
The book was probably written, as I have said, late 
in the ninth, or early in the eighth century, B. C., 
most likely in Northern Israel, where Solomon was 
never a great favorite. 

The Song of Songs needs no apology for its char- 
acter, or for its appearance in the Old Testament 
Canon. It needs no Solomonic authorship or alle- 
gorical interpretation to defend its claim. It can 
afford to stand on its own merits. It has been a 
favorite subject of attack with the Voltairean school 
of critics. It has been assailed as grossly sensuous. 
But it is not so in reality. Considering the time 
when it was written, and that it is an oriental poem, 
its imagery is singularly pure. And in its central 
purpose it is the peer of any book from Genesis to 
Revelation. It celebrates a fidelity so perfect, that 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 145 


not even the most splendid King of Israel, with all 
the gifts and blandishments at his command, could 
swerve the Shulamite maiden from her fond allegi- 
ance to her rustic lover. It is a poor business, 
throwing dirt at such a book as this. 

Taken for what it is, the book would never have 
been very harmful, though it might have been un- 
duly exciting to the youthful imagination. But 
taken as an allegory of God’s love for the Church, 
or for the individual soul, it has been extremely 
pernicious in its influence. It has conduced to 
spiritual lasciviousness, to what Theodore Parker 
called “ voluptuousness with God.” St. Bernard 
preached scores of sermons from it reeking with 
sensuous images of spiritual relations. The Mora- 
vians fed with it their morbid appetite for passion- 
ate images of the soul’s union with God until their 
hymns were marvels of obscenity. It was a great 
favorite with the early Methodists, and Dr. Adam 
Clarke, himself a Methodist, has testified that its 
influence was exceedingly demoralizing, so potent 
is the universal tendency to carry over sensuous- 
ness from the realm of feeling and imagination into 
that of life. And even if it is not carried over, it 
is hardly less pernicious. The ecstasy of a St. Cath- 
erine of Siena, fancying herself the mystic bride of 
Christ, is that for which the manly piety of Jesus 
had no politer term than adultery of the heart. * 
Last, but not least, the book of Job remains to 
be considered. And certainly I could not have a 

* P'or the pathological aspect of such phenomena, see Dr. Mauds- 
ley, Body and Mind. He regards the ecstasy of St. Catherine as a 
soec/es of insanity, caused by an inflammation of the ovaries. 


lAb THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 

better with which to conclude my account of the 
Old Testament literature, for indeed it is a wonder- 
ful book, dealing with a great problem in a lofty 
spirit, and in a grand poetic style. It is the nearest 
approach we have to a dramatic poem in the Old 
Testament, with the exception of the Song of Songs. 
In the Song of Songs there is a development of 
action ; here, at the most, only a development of 
ideas. The Song of Songs is confined to the dram- 
atis personce , but in Job we have a prose introduc- 
tion, Chapters I. and II., and a prose conclusion, 
both historical in form, not a prologue and epi- 
logue. The remainder of the book is more a dia- 
logue than a drama, properly speaking. There are 
six speakers in all, Job, his three “ comforters,” Elihu 
and the Deity. The dialogue is broken up into three 
series of speeches, besides the speech of Elihu and 
that of the Deity. The first series consists of six 
speeches, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar each speak- 
ing once, and Job answering each of them in turn.* 
The secondf repeats this number and order. The 
third series:); consists of but four speeches, Zophar 
having retired from the discussion. The speech of 
Elihu extends from the beginning of the thirty- 
second to the end of- the thirty-seventh chapter ; 
that of the Deity from the thirty-eighth to the end 
of the forty-first. Then come a few words from 
Job, and afterwards the prose conclusion. The 
unity of the book has often been assailed by various 
critics. Some have argued that both the introduce 

* Chapters IV.— XIV. 

f Chapters XV.— XXI. 

X Chapters XXII.— XXXI. 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 47 

tion and the conclusion are later additions, with 
some reason in the first instance, and with a great 
deal in the second, which gives up the case entirely 
to the three friends of Job, who have all along been 
trjdng to put him in the wrong. Poetic justice is 
done him. He gets twice as many sheep and oxen 
and camels and she-asses as he had before, and seven 
sons once more and three daughters, the children, 
let us hope, of a second wife of more agreeable 
disposition than the first. This conclusion cer- 
tainly has the appearance of an after-thought, stuck 
on by some conventionally orthodox person. But 
there is less agreement among the critics about this 
than about the speech of Elihu, which is almost 
universally regarded as an interpolation, for reasons 
which appear to me extremely satisfactory. It in- 
terrupts the natural climax of the poem. Its solu- 
tion of the question in dispute is not that of Yah- 
weh. It is an advance upon the solution of Job’s 
friends. But it is also an advance upon the solution 
of Yah well. If the poet had arrived at this solu- 
tion, he would probably have put it into the mouth 
of Yahweh instead of the one he has put there. Be- 
sides, the speech of Elihu has peculiarities of style 
which put it into post-exilic times, a hundred years 
at least after the remainder of the dialogue. 

The subject of the poem is a subject of perennial 
interest. It is the relation of suffering to personal 
character. The received idea among the Hebrews 
up to the seventh century had been that for indi- 
viduals and states outward success and peace and 
happiness were the invariable rewards of a good 


14B 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


life. Strange as it may seem to us, that such a 
doctrine could hold its ground a day in the presence 
of so many contradictory facts, it did hold its ground 
for centuries. “ I have been young, and now am 
old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, and 
his seed begging bread.” So writes one of the 
psalmists. It did not look so to Col. Newcome, as 
he sat there in the Charter House, and heard the 
choir chanting these ancient words. How could it 
look so to anyone who did not argue backward re- 
morselessly from the calamity to the unrighteous- 
ness of the sufferer? It certainly did not look so 
to the writer of Job, and his book was written to 
protest against the received doctrine that outward 
happiness and fortune were proportioned to the 
righteousness of individuals and states. His hero 
was a man of blameless life, and he was smitten 
down beneath the weight of infinite misfortune. 
Stripped bare of children and possessions ; advised 
by her who should have been his comforter, to 
“ curse God and die,” he still held fast to his integ- 
rity, and refused to allow that he had sinned against 
his maker. His three friends represent the conven- 
tional idea of retribution, and repeat its argument 
over and over again with “ damnable iteration.” 
But they do not make the least impression upon 
him. When they have finished he cries out : 

“ O, that one heard me ! 

Lo ! here is my signature : 

Let the Almighty answer me. 

And let mine adversary write down his charge : 

Verily I will carry it on my shoulder 

And bind it on me as a crown.” 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 49 

The advance of Elihu’s argument on the others 
is in its clearer assertion of the corrective character 
and purpose of suffering. But this solution of the 
difficulty was not that of the writer of the book of 
Job. Indeed for him there was no solution. “Then 
the Eternal answered Job out of the whirlwind, and 
said: — What did he say? Nothing that threw 
any light upon the awful problem which had shaken 
the moral nature of Job to its foundations, but only 
many things in proof of his exalted power and 
wisdom. Let Job deny the inevitable sequence of 
righteousness and happiness, but let him not dare 
to deny the wisdom, power and righteousness of 
God. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right ? ” Abject submission to His inscrutable designs 
is the conclusion of the whole matter : 

“To bow before the awful will. 

And bear it with an honest heart.” 

It is commonly assumed that what this writer 
missed, the real solution of his problem, was the 
doctrine of a future state of rewards and punish- 
ments. That such a doctrine would have seemed to 
him the real solution of the problem I can hardly 
doubt. But that it would have been the real solu- 
tion, I am compelled to doubt very seriously. Is 
not the real solution to be sought for in the one- 
ness of the individual with the Infinite, the All ? — a 
conscious solution when this oneness is consciously 
apprehended. But when it is not, God still takes 
the responsibility. 

The book of Job was the first sturdy protest 
against the current Hebrew doctrine of recompense. 


150 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


It was not: the last. Jeremiah amended it by say- 
ing, “ The inquities of the fathers are visited upon 
the children,” which Ezekiel denies with passion. 
But, six hundred years after the time when Job was 
probably written, the doctrine of compensation had 
been completely turned around. In the New Testa- 
ment it is not wealth but poverty that is the sign 
of heavenly favor. “ Blessed are the poor.” “ Go to, 
ye rich men, weep and howl, for ye have received 
your consolation.” “ How hardly shall they who 
have riches enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Doubt- 
less this doctrine is as unphilosophic as the antipo- 
dal doctrine in the Old Testament. 

When and by whom was the book of Job writ- 
ten ? The first question is more easily answered 
than the second. It was probably written about 
600, B. C. The fall of Josiah was possibly, as 
Kuenen thinks, the political occasion of it. But I 
cannot see that it needed any special political occa- 
sion, although the overthrow of the good King Jo- 
siah must have been a fearful strain on the conven- 
tional idea of reward and punishment. Renan puts 
the book as far back as 800, B. c., and others put it 
after the captivity. To arrive at certainty is hard, 
but various indications point to about 6oo, B. C., as 
the most probable date. In that case it was not 
written by Moses, as is laboriously contended by 
its latest critic, Cowles, whose commentary on it 
has just appeared. The whole argument assumes 
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and is still 
as thin as vanity. The God of Job is the God of 
universal nature and of all mankind, a conception 


THE PSALMS AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 5 1 

never dreamt of till the eighth century, B. c. Who 
was the author of this wonderful book, we have no 
means of knowing. He was another Great Un- 
known, the greatest of the sages, as the Deutero- 
Isaiah was of the prophets. Across the lapse of 
four and twenty centuries another poet* answers 
him, a poet even simpler than he in his poetic 
forms : 

Honor to those who have failed ; 

And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea ; 

And to those who sank themselves in the sea ; 

And to the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest 
heroes known. 

We have now come to the end of our consideration 
of the Old Testament writings. Together we have 
been witnesses of the gradual development of Israel’s 
religion, the gradual growth and manufacture of its 
various books, and what we have seen has not at 
any point been a supernatural spectacle, but an en- 
tirely natural and human one. If we have even ap- 
proximated to the actual truth, we have discovered 
that the Old Testament is a book of many voices — 
voices of various compass and expression, but all, 
without exception, human voices ; human, and 
therefore often fallible. And we have seen enough 
to make us wonder how much longer such a book 
will hold the absolutely unique position which it 
holds to-day, whereby its texts serve in the place 
of arguments to impede the advance of science, and 
bolster many a tottering iniquity. 

But what I have told in these lectures is but a 


* Walt Whitman. 


152 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


little part of the whole story. I have often been 
compelled to give you mere results where I would 
gladly have given you arguments, if the minutes 
had been hours. And of the beauty and glory 
which shine forth on many a page of psalm and 
prophecy, wisdom and law, I have said almost noth- 
ing, for I have been dealing with the different books 
somewhat externally. 

“ Others shall sing the song ; 

Others shall right the wrong ; 

Finish what I begin, 

And all I fail of win.” 


But as for the principal idea which has been forced 
upon us — that the religion of Israel was not “ a 
ladder let down from heaven,” but one that was 

( built up round by round from the good solid earth 
— for this I offer no apology. A hundred times 
more rational, it is a thousand times more beautiful 
than the idea it displaces. It makes the religion of 
Israel of a piece with all the other great religions of 
humanity, and with the universal order, which by a 
million million infinitesimal variations has been 
evolved from the primeval chaos. 


FIFTH LECTURE. 


THE APOCRYPHA: THE MISSING LINK. 

Hardlyanything else has contributed so much to 
give the origin of Christianity an abnormal and 
miraculous appearance, as the gap apparently and 
really existing between the Old and New Testa- 
ment literature. I say “ apparently and really,” for 
the gap is not so great as it is made to appear in 
our English Bible ; there is a “ missing link,” but 
some of the materials for forging it are at hand in 
the Old Testament. If Malachi were indeed the 
latest book in the Old Testament Canon, as it is 
represented by its marginal date, 397, B. C., there 
would be a gap of four hundred and fifty years be- 
tween this book and the earliest books of the New 
Testament. No wonder then- that Christianity has 
impressed the multitude as an interpolation from a 
supernatural sphere, — Jesus an unrelated person, 
wholly sui generis , teaching a doctrine of which 
there had been no previous anticipation. That the 
gap is in reality a good deal less than four hundred 
and fifty years has made no difference with the 
majority, for the fact has either been denied by 
their constituted teachers or passed over in prudent 
silence. But if we have not wholly gone astray, in 
the lectures of this course already given, the mar- 

153 


*54 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


ginal date of Malachi, 39 7, is far from being the 
latest date of any Old Testament book, though it is 
fifty years too late for Malachi . The books of Ezra 
and Nehemiah , even in their original form, were 
written after Malachi , and did not assume their 
present form until 250, B. C., when the books of 
Chronicles made their appearance with these incor- 
porated in them. We have good reason to believe 
that many of the Psalms were written after Malachi, 
together with the books of Ruth and Jonah and Ec- 
clesiastes and Esther and Daniel, the last only one 
hundred and sixty-five years before Christ, and 
Esther and Ecclesiastes not very long before. Thus 
between Malachi and Paul’s first Epistle, we have 
a considerable amount of Old Testament literature, 
a good deal of material out of which to forge the 
missing link. But we have nothing like enough. 
We get some wonderful glimpses of what was 
transpiring in the bosom of Judaism ; but there is 
need of much more light if we are going to under- 
stand the natural development of Christianity from 
the parent faith. The last word of the Old Testa- 
ment, unless a psalm or two are later still, is Daniel, 
and even this was written more than two hundred 
years before the first line of the New Testament. The 
gap is still considerable ; the missing link still lacks 
material. And where shall more be found ? A 
great deal more in the Apocrypha ; but the books 
herein contained need to be supplemented by 
others; which are not even contained as these are 
in the Roman Catholic Bible, such as the book of 
Enoch, which is in the Bible of the Abyssinian 


THE APOCR YPHA. 


155 


Christians; such as the Sibylline Books, the Book of 
Jubilees* the Psalms of Solomon , so called, the 
writings of Josephus and the Talmudic Mishna. 
With all these helps much will remain obscure; but 
using them discreetly, they will convince the can- 
did, if not the most skeptical, that a rose upon its 
bush in June is not more natural and timely than 
. Jesus was in the Galilee of Herod Antipas, and 
under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. And 
moreover, the genesis and growth of much that is 
implied in Jesus are thus made apparent. For 
when the curtain rises on the scenes of the New 
Testament, Judea is the province of an empire of 
which even* the pseudo-Daniel did not dream, and 
which lay far, far beneath the horizon of Malachi 
and his contemporaries. Moreover Scribes, Phari- 
sees, Sadducees and Essenes, sects of which 
Malachi was entirely ignorant, jostle each other on 
the narrow stage. The synagogue, an institution 
of which the Old Testament is wholly innocent, in 
the New Testament is of more importance than the 
temple. Again, the language of the speakers in 
the New Testament is entirely strange, not merely 
that it is Greek or Aramaic instead of Hebrew, but 
that it is concerning angels and devils, concerning 
immortality and the resurrection of the body, and 
paradise and hell, of all which Malachi and his con- 
temporaries had only learned the alphabet. And 
yet no less a scholar than Westcott, anxious to 
make a point, speaks of the time from Malachi to 
Jesus as a period of stagnation. Never at any 
* Sometimes included in the Abyssinian Canon. 


1 56 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 

time did a more active principle of change preside 
over the fortunes of the Jewish people. And the 
change was as important as it was immense, im- 
portant for prospective Christianity as well as pres- 
ent Judaism. No Jewish synagogue, no Christian 
church. No Jewish scribe, no Christian minister. No 
Jewish gehenna, possibly no Christian hell. No Jew- 
ish immortality, no such gigantic other-worldliness, 
obscuring the ethical simplicity of Jesus with its 
absurd or solemn phantasms. No general resur- 
rection of the body, then no special resurrection of 
Jesus to usurp the place of every higher argument 
for immortality. “If the dead rise not,” said Paul, 
“ then is Christ not risen/’ 

We have need then of every help of which we 
can avail ourselves to understand the process of de- 
velopment from Malachi to Paul. As I have said, 
the Old Testament is not entirely silent on this 
period, though at the first blush it appears to be so. 
In Esther we have seen the introduction of the 
Purim feast into Judea; in Chronicles the entire 
recasting of the national history in the priestly in- 
terest. In Ecclesiastes we have heard a plaintive 
cry of discontent with both the temple and the 
Scribes ; in, Daniel r a great voice of prophecy and 
exhortation, the last not wholly vain, the prophecy, 
like the predictions of far greater men, destined to 
utter disappointment ; the first hint also of the resur- 
rection of the body. The books of the Apocrypha, 
with which we are to deal to-night, fill up the gulf still 
more between Old Testament and New; but yet 
other books are needed to bridge it over perfectly. 


THE APOCRYPHA . 


157 


These can be sought and found outside the Bible’s 
most inclusive boundaries. Their names I have 
already given.* 

The books contained in the Apocrypha, as it is 
commonly printed, are not all regarded as canon- 
ical even by the Roman church. The exceptions 
are the two books of Esdras and the Prayer of 
Manasses. The others were adjudged canonical by 
the Council of Trent, April 8th, 1546, as they had 
been by the Council of Carthage, in 397, A. D. The 
Lutheran and the Anglican churches do not consider 
them canonical, but allow them to be printed with 
the rest of the Bible, and read “ for instruction.” 
Other branches of the Protestant Church have made 
apocryphal, which originally meant hidden, (a hidden 
meaning being attributed to the books), mean spuri- 
ous, and in accordance with this view the Apocry- 
pha has not been printed by other Bible Societies 
than the Lutheran and Anglican. I have myself 
been taken to task for using a text from it, as if I 
had sinned against the Holy Ghost; but in this 
pulpit it has always been a favorite section of the 
Bible. 

The books of the Apocrypha were not admitted 
into the Jewish canon, mainly, because the destruc- 
tion of the Jewish state in 70, A. D., naturally threw 
back the Jews with exclusive admiration on what 
had been accepted as canonical before that event. 
These books were then already knocking at the 
door of the Jewish canon, and would have been ad- 
mitted but for the destruction of Jerusalem. To 

* Vide, pp. 154, 155. 


153 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


the canon of the Alexandrian Jews, whom this 
catastrophe did not seriously affect, they were ad- 
mitted, and from thence passed over into the keep- 
ing of the early Christian Church. Though never 
quoted expressly in the New Testament their influ- 
ence is often unmistakable, and by the early schol- 
ars of the Church they are continually quoted as of 
equal authority with the Old Testament and those 
which have never been admitted into the Roman 
canon ; Enoch, which is in the Ethiopic canon only, 
being even quoted in the New Testament, in the 
Epistle of Jude. The Council of Carthage, which 
decided on the canonicity of those which were 
again canonized at Trent, was the same Council 
which decided on the canonicity of our New Testa- 
ment books. It had as good reasons in the one 
case as in the other, and Protestants who attach 
any value to its judgment of the New Testament 
writings, are bound to attach equal value to its 
judgment of the Apocrypha. The arguments of 
Protestant divines against their canonicity, are for 
the most part miserable make-shifts. The puerility 
of certain portions is charged upon the whole. 
They are not written in Hebrew, we are told, like 
the Old Testament books.’ No more is the New 
Testament, and for the same good reason. When 
it was written, Hebrew was not the language of the 
time and place where it was written. Some of the 
later Old Testament books are written in a different 
Hebrew from the earlier. As for internal character- 
istics, whatever militates against their value can be 
matched in the Old Testament. The most doubt- 


THE APOCR YE HA, 


159 

ful history is no more doubtful than that of Chron- 
icles , and is less wilfully misrepresented. The an- 
gel of Tobit is no more fictitious than the angel of 
Jacob. The murder of Holofernes by Judith is 
paralleled by that of Sisera by Jael, and the gen- 
eral spirit of the book of Judith is not so savage 
and vengeful as that of Esther. But to those who 
set no artificial value on the Old Testament these 
comparisons are for the most part superfluous. To 
such the canon is but a list of books which for one 
reason or another came, in course of time, to be re- 
garded as of remarkable and even supernatural im- 
portance. Remarkable we may allow ; but to say 
supernatural we have no faintest warrant. The 
books of the Old Testament differ among them- 
selves in value and significance. In the Apocrypha 
there are books which, if not equal to some in the 
Old Testament, are certainly superior to others. 
We could give up Esther and Ecclesiastes much bet- 
ter than the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus. 
The first book of Maccabees is a chapter which the 
epic of the centuries could ill afford to spare, while 
Chronicles , however interesting as a contribution to 
the history of opinions, has no such moral energy, 
and tells no such unvarnished tale of heroism and 
unwavering fidelity. The genius of Handel knew 
its own when it made Judas Maccabaeus the theme 
of one of his most glorious oratorios. High art is 
never narrow or sectarian, and therefore it has found 
in the Apocrypha a never-failing fountain of sug- 
gestion. Music and poetry and painting have dis- 
covered here some of their choicest themes, some 


l6o THE BIBLE OF TO- DA Y. 

of their grandest inspirations. Commend me to 
the artists, rather than to the theologians, as judges 
of what is most inspiring, and by consequence the 
most inspired. 

The first book in the Apocrypha is one which 
might discourage a new-comer from proceeding any 
further. It is the first book of Esdras , sometimes 
called the third because, Esdras being the Greek 
form of Ezra, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are 
designated in the Vulgate as the first and second 
books of Esdras. This book is for the most part a 
rehash of material contained in Chronicles and Ezra y 
and adds little or nothing to the original, which is 
far more trustworthy as history. First we have an 
account of the great passover celebrated by Josiah, 
after the discovery of Deuteronomy and the subse- 
quent reform ; then, in order, accounts of Cyrus’s 
permission for the captives to return, of the rebuild- 
ing of the temple, its interruption and completion 
and the publication of the Law. Seeing that we 
have all this in better form elsewhere, the most 
interesting portion of the book is the episode, be- 
ginning at chapter III., 4, the argument before the 
king, Darius, as to which, wine, woman, or the 
Truth is the strongest, from which, in slightly 
modified form, we get the glorious proverb Magna 
est veritas et prcevalebit ; — “ Truth is mighty and will 
prevail,” a sentiment whose latest echo is the noble 
plea which Dr. Holmes has written for the substitu- 
tion of Veritas, the earliest motto of Harvard Col- 
lege, for the later and present one. To Christ and 
the Church : 


THE APOCR YPHA. 


161 


“Nurse of the future, daughter of the past, 

That stern phylactery best becomes thee now : 

Lift to the morning star thy marble brow ! 

Cast thy brave Truth on every warring blast ; 

Stretch thy white hand to that forbidden bough 
And let thine earliest symbol be thy last.” 

The first book of Esdras was perhaps written 
from a purely literary impulse, the writer fancying 
he could improve on the original account ; perhaps 
from a desire to hold up the character of Cyrus as a 
model to the foreign oppressors of Judea. The au- 
thor would seem to have been a Greek-speaking 
Jew resident in Egypt, and this book to have been 
written in the first century before Christ. Quoted 
as Scriptural authority by Athanasius and August- 
ine, it was nevertheless omitted from the canon by 
the Council of Carthage, and this omission was con- 
firmed at Trent. 

The second book of Esdras , the fourth according 
to the Vulgate reckoning, is a much more important 
contribution to our knowledge of the hopes and 
theories that were in ebullition in Judea, in the 
time of Jesus. At the earliest it was not written 
long before his birth ; at the latest not later than 
the end of the first Christian century. The date is 
harder to decide because the book has been freely 
interpolated by a Christian hand, and it is not 
always easy to distinguish the limits of the interpo- 
lations. Like Daniel, the book pretends to have 
been written by one who had been dead four or five 
hundred years. This sort of pseudonymous writing 
was the order of the day. The book is further like 
Daniel in being an example of Apocalyptic writing, 


62 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


the peculiarity of which consists in its representa- 
tions of coming events by extended rhetorical vis- 
ions in which imaginary beasts play a distinguished 
part. The two great examples of this sort of writ 
ing in the Bible are the books of Daniel and Revela 
tion. The second book of Esdras makes a third 
and the book of Enoch still another of the most 
striking character, and so instructive that it is a 
pity the Abyssinian Bible has its exclusive benefit. 
Daniel’s fourth empire, which was the Greek with 
him, here figures as the Roman, and the great 
events which Daniel had predicted on the downfall 
of the Greek Empire not having happened, they 
are here postponed till the destruction of the Rom- 
an Empire is accomplished. The first two and last 
two chapters of the book are plainly Christian addi- 
tions. The remainder is made up of a series of 
dream-visions, six in all, very mysterious, with ex- 
planations hardly less so, concluding with a revela- 
tion to Esdras that “ the world has lost its youth, 
and the times wax old,” and a command for him to 
take five men “ ready to write swiftly,” and dictate 
to them the contents of all the sacred books which 
had been burned by the Chaldeans. For forty days 
he dictated day and night, and from his dictation 
the five scribes wrote two hundred and four books 
“to publish openly,” and afterwards seventy others 
for the wise only among the people. One could 
hardly have a better sample of the critical acumen 
of the early fathers than their acceptance of this 
story as a true account of the miraculous preservation 
of the Old Testament books, though of the twohun- 


THE APOCRYPHA. 


163 

dred and seventy-four thus written only thirty-nine 
remained to them. Irenaeus and Tertullian, and even 
Clement and Augustine, scholars among the fathers, 
swallowed this camel as easily as if it had been a 
gnat. And yet this marvellous story is but the 
lengthened shadow of the fact that Ezra was the 
publisher, if not the writer, of the whole Levitic 
legislation, and that from his resolute activity dated 
a new order in the religious life and doctrine of his 
people. The second book of Esdras is a wail of 
bitter disappointment over the hard fate of Judea, 
but the persuasion finally prevails that, however 
dark the present, the Lord cannot withhold his 
mercy forever, and the appearance of his anointed 
one cannot be long delayed. As a book written 
during the first Christian century, and near its close 
the book is interesting as showing how absolutely 
unconscious Judaism was of the significance of 
Christianity. The coming of Messiah is still future, 
and the claim of Jesus to the messianic office does 
not so much as demand a passing word of reproba- 
tion. 

“ How calm a moment may succeed * 

One that shall thrill the world forever ! ” 

The Abyssinian is the only Christian canon which 
contains the fourth book of Esdras , it having been 
rejected by the Council of Carthage, and again by 
that of Trent. But between Carthage and Trent it 
was printed in the Vulgate, and parts of it still 
linger in the Roman service. Such a book is proof 
positive that the forms of thought of the New 

* “ Precede ” in the original by Alfred Domett. 


164 THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY. 

Testament are by no means sui generis, but those of 
the Jew as well as the Christian in the first century. 
We find here many a curious analogue of Paul’s 
theology and the imagery of John in the Apoca- 
lypse. 

The next book in the Apocrypha is the Book of 
Tobit. It is the story of a faithful Jew of the As- 
syrian captivity, whose prayers and alms are not 
forgotten, but secure him ample blessings after a 
period of sad mishap. In fact, the writer is one 
who joins the three friends of Job to charge him 
with folly in denying the infallible connection of 
piety and good fortune within the limits of the 
present life. The book is similar to Job at various 
points, and it is not unlikely that the author had 
Job in his mind and felt he was improving on its 
treatment of the universal problem : Why is the 
good man made to suffer? Tobit is remarkable for 
its union of the most natural and human elements 
with the baldest supernatural traits. In many parts 
of it there is a charming simplicity. No other book 
in the whole Bible has such a warm, domestic color- 
ing; the home life of the Cohens in Daniel De- 
ronda is hardly made more real than, that of Tobit 
and his wife and their son Tobias. On the other 
hand, the supernatural element is omnipresent. 
We have a complete doctrine of angels. A group 
of seven, standing before God, present to him the 
prayers of the pious. The angel Raphael, passing 
himself off as a distant relative of Tobias, makes a 
long journey with him. The bad angel Asmodeus, 
desiring Sara for himself, kills seven of her hus* 


THE APOCRYPHA . 


I6 5 

bands on their bridal night, and is finally outwitted 
by Tobias who, with the smoking heart and liver 
of a fish, a device of Raphael’s suggestion, drives 
him away into the utmost parts of Egypt, where a 
good angel binds him. This is the atmosphere of 
the Talmudic legends and the “Arabian Nights.’' 
Palestine has already borrowed the whole Persian 
angelology. The seven angels about God repro- 
duce the seven councillors of King Darius. The doc- 
trines of prayer and alms prepare us for the Phari- 
saic pride in these “ means of grace ” which kindled 
the pure flame of Jesus’ indignation. But there is 
no trace of Hellenism in Tobit. The book was 
probably written in the first quarter of the second 
century, B. C., and by a Palestinian Jew who had no 
personal acquaintance with the scene of his story. 
Hence, a good deal of bad geography. Origen and 
other early Christian scholars quoted it as regular 
Scripture. It was an especial favorite in the West- 
ern Church and was made canonical at Carthage, 
and again at Trent. Luther’s fondness for it is well 
known. Its homely domestic quality must have 
attracted him, and its childish superstition certainly 
did not repel him. 

As Tobit is another Job, so Judith is another 
Jael, — a mingled Jael and Esther, perhaps we might 
say more truly. Judith is one of the great Bible 
story books. Her figure, with the head of Holo- 
fernes in her hand, is one that artists have a hun- 
dred times essayed to paint, and as I read the book 
it is made far more impressive because, with my 
mind’s eye, I see Judith always wonderful with the 


1 66 THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY. 

beauty that a modern artist has given her upon his 
canvas. The most of you are well acquainted with 
the story of the book: how Nebuchadnezzar, King 
of Nineveh, sent out his general, Holofernes, tc 
compel the whole earth to worship him alone ; how, 
ravaging and murdering, he came at length to Beth- 
uliah, and lay siege to it, and cut off its supply of 
water ; how the people were in such sore distress 
that they begged the elders to give up the town to 
the invader; and then how Judith, the rich widow, 
as good as she was beautiful, devised a plan for 
bringing all the counsels of the enemy to nought. 
Arraying herself splendidly, she sought the camp of 
Holofernes, and was admitted to his tent. And 
having seen her beauty, he forgot all things else, 
and thought only how he might win her. But when 
she feigned compliance, and he, for joy thereat, had 
drunk him into a heavy sleep, she took his falchion 
and at two strokes cut off his head, and then, upon 
the plea of going to her morning prayers outside 
the camp, she made off with the head of Holofernes 
to Bethuliah. And when the Assyrians knew their 
general had been murdered, and saw his head sus« 
pended from the wall, they fled in terror, but were 
overtaken and despoiled, and the remnant of them 
was pursued beyond Damascus. And Judith’s 
share was Holofernes’ tent, with all its gorgeous 
stuffs and costly vessels, and better still a crown of 
olive and the love of all her people, and many 
years of honored widowhood. Such is the story, 
and it is told very powerfully. It is a fiction, not a 
history of any actual occurrence. The writer did 


THE APOCRYPHA. 


1 67 


not try to keep up an appearance of historic veri- 
similitude. He made Nebuchadnezzar King of 
Nineveh after the captivity, though Nineveh was 
taken by his father before the captivity, and he 
himself was King of Babylon. Wherever we can 
check the writer’s history, it proves to be absurd. 
Holofernes is an unknown general, and Bethuliali is 
an unknown city. But, though the book is a fiction, 
it is a fiction with a purpose, as Esther was and 
Daniel and Jonah. Its purpose was — all here is 
probability — to fire some woman’s heart to such a 
deed as that of Charlotte Corday,* her Marat some 
general of the Syrian Seleucidse or some royal op- 
pressor like Demetrius. Such a purpose would as- 
sign the book to the last quarter of the second 
century, B. C. In the sixteenth chapter there is a 
song of Judith, suggested by the song of Deborah. 
The seventeenth verse is strangely parallel with a 
verse in Mark,'“ Where their worm dieth not, and 
their fire is not quenched “Woe to the nations 
that rise up against my kindred. The Lord Al- 
mighty will take vengeance on them in the day of 
judgment, putting fire and worms in their flesh ; 
and they shall feel them and weep forever.” The 
book of Judith has been canonical in the Roman 
Church since the first Council of Carthage. It may 
well be that more than once it has nerved to treach- 
erous or open murder the assassin’s arm.f But art 
is debtor to it more than morals or religion. 

* Since writing this I have read that Charlotte Corday’s act was 
directly inspired by the book of Judith. 

f Donatello’s statue of Judith in Florence was set up by the people 
as an “ exemplum salutis publicce." 


) 


THE BIBLE OF TO-JQA V. 


1 68 

Next after the book of Judith we have certain 
additions to the book of Esther. These in the Sep- 
tuagint were scattered through the book of Esther , 
but in the Latin Vulgate, following Jerome, they 
conclude the tenth and make six other chapters. 
These additions were probably written midway of 
the first century, B. C. There is but little doubt 
why they were written. The original book does 
npt contain the name of God, or any allusion to 
the Deity from beginning to end. To the pious 
Jew this was a serious defect, and there were rabbis 
who opposed the admission of Esther into the 
canon on account of it. The additions were mani- 
festly written to supply this serious defect. They 
are larded thick with the divine name, and blacken 
that of Haman with a more malignant energy than 
the original ; a difficult business, and yet possible. 
Josephus uses these additions freely, and our earli- 
est knowledge of them is from his writings. But 
for some reason they were rejected by his country- 
men, perhaps because they were so greedily ac- 
cepted by the early Christians. Their canonical 
dignity in the Roman Church was confirmed by 
the Council of Trent. 

The next step in the Apocrypha is to a higher 
plane, from which our view begins to widen, and 
our impression of the country as a whole to grow 
more favorable. The Wisdom of Solomon is an- 
other instance of the habit, so inveterate with the 
Jews and early Christians, of putting forth their 
teachings in the name of some distinguished person 
long since dead. And yet so little critical discrim- 


THE APOCR YEHA. 


169 

ination had the great scholars of the early Church, 
that some of the wisest of them confidently ascribed 
this book to Solomon. Even if the book of Prov- 
erbs were his, as these assumed, it would still be 
impossible to attribute the book of Wisdom to the 
same author. Who was its author no modern critic 
has been bold enough to say, and to discover is 
impossible. The suggestion of Augustine that it 
was Jesus, the son of Sirach, the author of Ecclesi- 
asticus , is another proof of Augustine’s defect of 
critical ability. When it was written cannot be 
confidently stated. Opinions vary through two 
centuries, a few extremists exceeding even these 
limits. The more general opinion puts it from fifty 
to a hundred years before the Christian era, but the 
opinion of Kuenen and others that it was written 
in the reign of Caligula (3 7 — 41, A. D.) has much to 
recommend it. The desire of that imperial maniac 
to have his image worshipped as a god is plainly 
reprehended. Where it was written is less doubt- 
ful. Doubtless in Alexandria. The writer was a 
Jew, strongly imbued with the philosophy of Plato, 
like his contemporary Philo Judaeus. His four car- 
dinal virtues are Platonic, so is his doctrine that 
“ the corruptible body presseth down the soul,” and 
his doctrine of wisdom, as an emanation from the 
Deity, is a compromise between the purely Pales- 
tinian personification of the Wisdom of Yahweh 
and the Platonic doctrine of the Logos. Identify 
this emanation with Jesus, and you have the proem 
of the fourth Gospel. Ewald well says, “ In the 
deep glow which, with all its apparent tranquility, 


170 


HIE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


streams through its veins, in the nervous energy of 
its proverbial style, in the depth of its representa- 
tions, we have a premonition of John ; and in the 
conception of heathenism a preparation for Paul, 
like a warm rustle of spring ere the time is fully 
come.” “ These preludings of a high philosophy 
and faith,” says Dean Stanley, “ whether two cen- 
turies before, or close upon the new era, are in 
any case the genuine product of Alexandrian Juda- 
ism, of the union of Greek and Hebrew thought.” 
And surely we could have no better evidence than 
is afforded in this book, that at the dawn of Chris- 
tianity everything that was best and highest in its 
teachings was possible without the least interpola- 
tion from a supernatural sphere. But this is not to 
say that Christianity was superfluous. These lofty 
teachings needed to be incarnated in some magnetic 
individual, and needed too — for history is always 
wise — to be invested in a wonderful mythology ere 
they could be the new religion of the Greek and 
Roman and Teutonic world. Without this vehicle the 
tonic sentiments of J esus could not have forced a pas- 
sage through the set lips of paganism, and coursing 
through its veins have made them thrill with new 
and higher life. 

However this may be, The Wisdom of Solomon 
is a book that might well have an honored place 
in either Testament, a bright 

“ Hesper-Phosphor, double name 
For what is one, the first, the last,” — 

the last of the declining day of Judaism, and the 
first of the new morn of Christianity. Its different 


THE APOCRYPHA . 


171 


parts are of unequal value, but it is full of wise and 
tender thoughtfulness. Nowhere else in the Bible, 
not even in the New Testament, which Dr. Hedge 
avers contains only one doubtful affirmation of the 
soul’s natural immortality — nowhere else is this 
doctrine asserted so strongly and clearly. “ For God 
created man to be immortal, and made him the 
image of his own eternity.” And here too is the 
first anticipation of that other immortality, which 
to George Eliot and many others seems a sufficient 
substitute for a future life of conscious immortality 
beyond the grave. “ Better is it to have no chil- 
dren, and to have virtue, for the memorial thereof is 
immortal ; because it is known with God and with 
men. When it is present men take example at it, and 
when it is gone they desire it. It weareth a crown, 
and triumpheth forever, having gotten the victory 
striving for undefiled rewards.” In making this 
book canonical in 397, A.D., the council of Carthage 
honored itself and the great council of Trent did 
well to follow its example. 

And this remark has an equal application to The 
Wisdom of Jesus , the Son of Sirach , known also as 
Ecclesiasticus , the Latin word corresponding to the 
Greek Ecclesiastes and like that meaning the 
preacher, although, according to Dean Stanley, the 
word in this instance was not part of the original 
title and merely indicates that this was an ecclesias- 
tical book among the early Christians; that is, 
used by them, and one of the first so used, 
to read from in the churches. Stanley has called 
this book “ the recommendation of the theol- 


172 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y, 


ogy of Palestine to Alexandria,” and the Wisdom 
of Solomon “ the recommendation of the theology 
of Alexandria to Palestine.” But in the case of 
Ben Sirach, the recommendation was not made by 
the original author, but by his grandson, who, as 
the prologue informs us, translated his grandfather’s 
book from Hebrew into Greek (in Egypt, presuma- 
bly at Alexandria,) in the year 132, B. C. This 
would place the original work about 180, B. C. The 
general character of the book is most akin to Wis- 
dom and the canonical book of Proverbs . But as it is 
from four to six hundred years younger than the 
latter and about two hundred older than the former 
it differs from them respectively, as we should ante- 
cedently expect. In the canonical Proverbs , devo- 
tion to the temple service is still far in the future, 
but in Ben Sirach nothing is more conspicuous. The 
closing section of the book begins “ Let us now 
praise famous men and our fathers that begat us,” 
and then follows a long catalogue of worthies in 
which Moses is dismissed with a few verses, and 
Aaron the High Priest comes in for a much larger 
share of honor. The same tendency to exalt the 
priesthood and the temple is shown in the glowing 
picture of the high priest Simon, as he appeared in 
the performance of his sacred functions. The same 
spirit is divulged in this passage as in the psalmist’s 
declaration, dating from this same period ; “ A day in 
thy courts is better than a thousand.” But Ben Sirach 
is not so much in love with the temple as to exalt 
its ceremonies above the claims of “ mere morality.” 
True to his order, for he is one of the sages, he is 


THE APOCRYPHA. 


m 


preeminently a moralist. And his morality, though 
frequently prudential, rises at its best to a much 
higher level than that of his canonical model. There 
are voices of compassion here which anticipate the 
tenderness of Jesus for the poor and erring. And 
now and then the voice of the philosopher deepens 
and rounds into prophetic utterance: “He that re- 
quiteth a good turn offereth fine flour, and he that 
giveth alms sacrificeth praise. To depart from un- 
righteousness is propitiation.” And, best of all, we 
have that passage which John Bunyan hunted for in 
his Bible a whole year and more, and at last stumbled 
upon in the Apocrypha ; which at first did some- 
what daunt him, but afterward he wrote, “ That 
word doth still oft-times shine before my face.” 
And no wonder, you will say, for it was this : “ Look 
at the generations of old and see. Did ever any 
trust in the Lord and were confounded, or did any 
abide in his fear and were forsaken?” There is 
many a foregleam in Ben Sirach of the light which 
should “ lighten the Gentiles,” as well as of the folly 
which that flame would scorch with righteous indig- 
nation, when prayers and alms should have become 
as formal and self-righteous as the blood of bullocks. 
Nearly contemporaneous with Ecclesiastes , this book 
is only less positive than that in its denial of a 
future life. It makes no affirmation. The only 
comfort it can give is that which Buddha gave to 
the young mother, Kisagotami : death is the uni- 
versal law. “ Fear not the sentence of death; re- 
member them that have been before thee and that 
come after, for this is the sentence of the Lord over 


174 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


all flesh/’ And yet the general aspect of the book 
is far more noble than that of Ecclesiastes . Written 
but a few years later, the wonder is why this did not 
attain canonical repute equally with that, or in pre- 
ference to it. The solution of this problem is two- 
fold. The writer of Ecclesiastes had the shrewdness 
to put forth his book as Solomon’s. But, further 
than this, it was the scribes who decided, for the 
most part, which books were canonical, and they 
were not friendly to Ben Sirach, because he was not 
friendly to them. In his list of famous men he does 
not even mention Ezra, their great prototype. His 
sympathies are with the Sadducaic party, which, in 
his time, already existed and opposed the Pharisaic, 
the party of the scribes. Nothing could be falser 
than the ordinary conception of the Sadducees as 
free-thinkers. It was not as free-thinkers, but as 
conservatives that they denied the resurrection of the 
body. The Scriptures did not teach these things 
and therefore they did not believe them. The 
Pharisees were the party of freedom, the innovators, 
foisting their meanings on the Scriptures, and piec- 
ing them out with their oral traditions. Ben Sirach’s 
sympathies were all with the conservatives, and so 
the scribes denied him a canonical position. But 
for emancipated minds his book is just as sacred out 
of the canon as it would be in it. Ubi spiritus, ibi 
Ecclesia and “ where the spirit is there is the ” holy 
Bible. The early Christians, wiser than the scribes, 
reversed their judgment ; Carthage and Trent de- 
clared the book canonical, but Protestantism reverted 
to the Pharisaic narrowness. 


THE AT OCR YPHA. 


75 


The book of Baruch follows Ben Sirach in ordin- 
ary editions of the Apocrypha. Here again is an 
example of the custom of pseudonymous writing, 
with a view to getting a more extended hearing and 
influence. To Baruch, the Scribe of Jeremiah whom 
Allston’s famous picture of the two has made so real 
for some of us, is attributed a book written about 
two hundred years after his time, that is soon after 
the Alexandrian Conquest, to encourage the Jews 
under their new rulers and hold out to them the 
prospect of their ultimate deliverance. The book 
has not a little dignity and power. The closing 
chapters have the veritable ring of ancient pro- 
phecy. The author was no mere copyist, but one 
who had drenched himself in the prophetic spirit. 
The council of Trent did well to reckon it canon- 
ical. An “ Epistle of Jeremy ” is commonly printed 
as its sixth chapter. This epistle is manufactured 
out of Jeremiah, X., and XXIX. It was probably 
written in the Maccabaean period and has no natural 
connection with the book of Baruch. Next after 
Baruch, we have The Song of the Three Holy Child- 
ren and the stories of Susanna and Bel and the 
Dragon, all additions to the book of Daniel by an- 
other hand than that of the original author. They 
are conceived in much the same spirit as the origi- 
nal, and have found equal favor with artists and 
poets, if not with Protestant theologians. By 
Roman Catholics they are regarded as rightfully be- 
longing to the original composition. I must myself 
confess to a great tenderness for Bel and the Dragon 
and allow that in my childhood it was my favorite 


1 76 THE BIBLE OF TO -DA V. 

portion of Scripture, which I was never tired of hear- 
ing read by one dear voice which I shall hear nc 
more. 

The Prayer of Manasses is not regarded as canon- 
ical by either Protestants or Romanists. Manasses 
or Manasseh was the most idolatrous, and at the 
same time the most prosperous of all the Kings of 
Judah. But this conjunction of idolatry and pros- 
perity was intolerable to the pious Jew, and so the 
story was invented that he was taken captive to 
Babylon and there, bitterly expiating his offences, 
repented of his evil deeds. I have said before, that 
this story is on a par with the death-bed repentance 
of Voltaire and Thomas Paine and other famous 
“ infidels.” It does not contain a particle of truth. 
The Prayer of Manasses is a noble fiction which 
does credit to its author, who wrote it not long be- 
fore the time of Christ. 

There is better Psalmody and Prophecy in the Old 
Testament than in the Apocryphal books, and bet- 
ter, or at least grander, “ wisdom,” if we put the 
Great Unknown who wrote the book of Job among 
the Sages, but there is no history so good as that 
contained in the first Book of Maccabees, none so sim- 
ple and truthful, and none which boasts a theme 
so epical in its inherent quality. The time de- 
scribed is that which generated the magnificent 
Apocalypse of Daniel and the Psalms of Solomon , the 
latter for some unaccountable reason never included 
in the Jewish or in any Christian canon but worthy of 
a place among the best. Were we considering the 
time or the literature of the time in its connection 


THE APOCRYPHA. 


1 77 


with events, these writings would demand from us 
the carefullest consideration.* But we are con- 
sidering now only the books of the Apocrypha. The 
first Book of Maccabees was doubtless written very 
shortly after the events which it describes : in the last 
part of the second century, B. C., or early in the first. 
It contains a history of the Jews from 175 to 135 B.C., 
a history which covers the attempt of Antiochus 
Epiphanes, the Syrian Greek, to root out the Jew- 
ish religion, and the revolt of the Jews, headed by 
Mattathias and his sons, ending in the establishment 
of a native Jewish monarchy for the first time since 
the rupture at the death of Solomon, and with a ter- 
ritorial extension equal to that of David’s Kingdom. 
A group of more commanding interest than that 
composed of Mattathias and his five stalwart sons, 
history does not contain in all her galleries of 
heroes. But from the group, Judas Maccabaeus, 
Judas the Hammer, stands forth as the most grandly 
simple and imposing. His brothers, Jonathan and 
Simon, played well their parts, but Judas his with so 
much mingled grace and power as should make a 
name which Christians have regarded as the most 
accursed of all names, for Jews one of the most 
honorable and blessed ; for Christians too, who can- 
not suffer even Christianity to confine their sympa- 
thies and admirations within sectarian limits. Not 
that the religion for which he put forth his strength 
was one which held the future in its fee. It was the 
religion of the temple, the religion of Levitical puri- 
ty, of the Sabbath and the Sabbatical year, of cir- 

* As well as certain Psalms, such as the 74th, 79th, ard noth. 


178 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


cum cision and sacrifice. And all of this the ethics of 
Jesus would implicitly, and the inclusive sympathies 
of Paul explicitly, discard. But in the meantime it 
was the religion of the Jews, and if their fidelity to 
it was worthy of a better cause, it was still an abso- 
lute fidelity to their sense of right. And it is such 
fidelity to personal conviction that makes a man a 
hero or a saint, apart from the intrinsic value of the 
cause for which he puts his life in jeopardy. Nor 
are there wanting signs that Judas Maccabaeus was 
no hide-bound formalist, but one who penetrated to 
the deeper spirit of the national religion. Even his 
father so far understood that “ the sabbath is made 
for man ” that he contemptuously refused to sacrifice 
the welfare of his cause to any fear of violating the 
day. If the enemy struck at him on that day, he 
would strike back his hardest, and not repeat their 
folly who had died like sheep, lest they should vio- 
late the Sabbath. Certain it is that Judas Macca- 
bseus was not a favorite with the Talmudic scribes. 
Not even his name appears in the Mishna. He was 
a popular rather than an ecclesiastical hero ; a 
patriot rather than a fanatic. 

The second book of Maccabees is parallel with the 
first from 176 to 160, B. c. ; but then comes to an 
end while the first goes on a good deal further. 
This book has more of the character of a compila- 
tion than the one which we have been considering, 
and was written at a much greater remove from the 
events narrated ; exactly when, it would be difficult 
to say. Judged by the calmer narrative of the first 
book of Maccabees and such extra- Jewish histories 


TIIL APOCRYPHA. 


179 


as are available, its historic value is inconsiderable. 
The Greek influence is plainly seen in the long 
speeches put into the mouths of the great person- 
ages in the story. There is an exaggerated tone 
throughout, culminating in miraculous features of 
the most astounding boldness, to one of which, the 
story of Heliodorus, we are indebted for the great 
fresco of the Vatican, painted by Raphael for Pope 
Julius II., to symbolize his victory over the enemies 
of his pontificate. Heliodorus having been sent to 
take away the treasures of the temple, “ There ap- 
peared a horse with a terrible rider upon him and 
adorned with a very fair covering, and he ran fierce- 
ly and smote at Heliodorus with his fore-feet; and 
it seemed that he that sat upon the horse had a 
complete harness of gold. Moreover, two other 
young men appeared before him, notable in strength, 
excellent in beauty, and comely in apparel, who 
stood by him on either side and scourged him con- 
tinually. And Heliodorus fell suddenly upon the 
ground and was compassed with great darkness.” 
There is much more of this sort, as when the proph- 
et Jeremiah appeared to Judas Maccabaeus and gave 
to him a golden sword, or when Antiochus was 
about to undertake a second expedition against 
Egypt. “ Through all the city through the space 
of almost forty days there were seen horsemen 
running in the air in cloth of gold and armed 
with lances, like a band of soldiers, and troops of 
horsemen in array encountering and running one 
against another with shaking of shields and multi- 
tude of pikes, and drawing of swords and casting of 


i So 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


darts, and glittering of golden ornaments and har- 
ness of all sorts.” Now all this is not only very pretty 
but it is very instructive. For besides this second 
book of Maccabees and the first which we have already 
noticed, both of which are in the Roman Catholic 
canon, there are three other books of Maccabees , 
none of them canonical* nor printed in ordinary edi- 
tions of the Apocrypha. Take all of these books to- 
gether and they are an admirable illustration of the 
growth of a legend. The first book of Maccabees 
is calm and sensible, and self-restrained. There is 
not a hint of miracle. Not a hint of supernatural 
interposition. This book was written very shortly 
after the events narrated. But the farther we get 
away from these events in the other books the 
more supernatural is the account of them, until at 
length the history which is at first so calm and 
sensible becomes a tissue of miraculous elements. 
And if a hundred years could work so great a 
change as this upon the Maccabaean history, what 
must not four, five and six hundred years have 
worked upon the history of the Exodus and the 
Conquest and the Early Monarchy? We have no 
reason to suppose that the Hebrews of the captivity 
were any more critical, any less imaginative, than 
the Jews of the first century, B. C. It is a notable 
fact that everywhere in the Old Testament or the 
New, when we come to close quarters with events, 
the miraculous wholly disappears or is reduced to a 
mere fraction of what it is in other places where 
the nar^ition is considerably removed from the 

* Third book of Maccabees is in the Ethiopic canon. 


THE APOCRYPHA. l8l 

events narrated. Renan declares, “A miracle has 
never yet been wrought in the presence of savans.” 
Or, we might add, in the presence of any clear- 
headed contemporary. 

There is one passage in the first book of Macca- 
bees which is as fertile in suggestion as any other I 
can now recall in the whole range of literature. It 
is that which recites, in the eighth chapter, the cir- 
cumstances of the first contact of Judea with the 
Roman commonwealth. This is the first mention 
in the Bible of that power, which in the following 
century was to be the Babylon of the Apocalypse. 
There is no hint of it in the Old Testament. Even 
in Daniel , written 165, B. c., the writer’s vision does 
not extend beyond the empire of the Seleucidae. 
After them the deluge. But this first appearance 
of Rome in the book of Maccabees is like that of 
Athene springing in panoply complete from Zeus’s 
brain. It is a truly wonderful picture of the power 
of Rome as seen from a distance, midway between 
the period of the Gracchi and the end of the Re- 
public. How bright and happy and auspicious 
seemed that first contact of Judea and the Roman 
power, even to this writer, sixty or eighty years 
afterward ! No shadow of suspicion of the dreadful 
days to come falls for a moment athwart his glow- 
ing page. But, as if such a shadow fell upon the 
hearts of his contemporaries, they were but ill- 
pleased with the compact which Judas Maccabaeus 
made with this portentous stranger of the West. 
Stanley imagines that it was the cause o i that de- 
fection of his army, on account of which he was 


1 82 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


defeated in his last battle, when he himself was 
numbered with the slain. Less than two centuries 
after that first happy meeting, the Roman legions 
smote Jerusalem into the dust, and made an end 
forever of the Jewish state. Again, three centuries 
later, the emperor Julian sought in vain to reinstate 
the pagan worship, which indeed he loved with a 
much deeper love than Constantine, “the first 
Christian Emperor,” was capable of cherishing for 
any object whatsoever. Dying, the story runs, he 
cried despairingly, “Thou hast conquered, O Gali- 
lean ! ” Little the Roman Senate thought when 
they received the ambassadors of Judas Maccabaeus 
that in five hundred years their mighty Rome would 
worship as a god a peasant of this nation, which 
now begged of them the help of their alliance. But 
would not Jesus have been more astonished if he 
had known that it would ever come to this? 

I have completed my account of the Apocrypha, 
but there is a single book which is beyond its pale, 
regarded as canonical by the Abyssinian Church 
alone, which I cannot forbear to mention. It is the 
book of Enoch which Dean Stanley has designated 
as “ the Divina Commedia of those troubled times ” 
which followed on the death of Simon Maccabaeus. 
Its date has been disputed, but the weight of 
scholarship is thrown in favor of its pre-Christian 
origin. At the latest it could hardly go more than 
midway into the first Christian century; for it is 
quoted in the book of Jude, which could hardly 
have been written later than 80, A. D., and it must 
have taken quite a little while for it to get up the 
repute necessary for such a quotation. Strangely 


THE APOCR YPHA. 


183 

enough, no book of our Apocrypha is directly 
quoted in the New Testament,' while Enoch has 
this honor. In form it is a series of apocalyptic 
visions seen by the patriarch Enoch, who walked 
with God until “ he was not, for God took him.” 
Speaking of the inchoate science which is a striking 
feature of the book, the exuberant and impassioned 
earnestness with which the writer dwells upon the 
regularity and uniformity of natural phenomena, 
Dean Stanley says, “ Had Western Christendom 
followed the example of the Ethiopic Church, and 
placed the book of Enoch in its canon, many a 
modern philosopher would have taken refuge under 
its authority from the attacks of ignorant alarmists ; 
many an enlightened theologian would have drawn 
from its innocent speculations cogent arguments to 
reconcile religion and science. The physics may be 
childish, the conclusions erroneous. But not even 
in the book of Job is the eager curiosity into all the 
secrets of nature more boldly encouraged, nor is 
there any ancient book, Gentile or Jewish, inspired 
by a more direct and conscious effort to resolve the 
whole system of the universe, moral, intellectual 
and physical, into a unity of government and idea 
and development.” 

But I have made mention of this book particular- 
ly, because no other in the Apocrypha or out of it 
throws such a flood of light upon the mental cir- 
cumstances of the time in which Christianity was 
born and had its first successes. Whether it was 
written just before the Christian era or contem- 
poraneously with its beginning, no one will claim 


1 84 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

that, with the exception of a few obvious inter- 
polations, it is a Christian book. A Christian 
book in the first Christian century without a syl- 
lable concerning Jesus, and regarding the advent 
of the Messiah as an event still future, is a mani- 
fest absurdity. It follows then, that if it did 
not itself create the circle of ideas in which the 
earliest Christians moved, it was, with early Christi- 
anity, the outcome of a circle of ideas that was all- 
inclusive, and in either case that much which we 
have always regarded in Christianity as entirely 
original, was common as the air which Jesus and 
his disciples breathed. “Here we find,” says Mar- 
tineau, “a century before the first line of the New 
Testament was written, all the chief features of its 
doctrine respecting the ‘ end of the world,’ and the 
‘ coming of the Son of Man ; ’ the same theatre, 
Jerusalem; — the same time, relatively to the writer, 
the immediate generation, — the hour at hand ; — the 
same harbingers, — wars and rumors of wars, and 
the gathering of Gentile armies against the elect ; — 
the same deliverance for the elect, — the advent of 
Messiah with the holy angels; the same decisive 
solemnity, — the Son of Man on the throne of his 
glory, with all nations gathered before him ; — the 
same award, — unbelievers to a pit of fire in the 
valley of Hinnom, and the elect to the halls of the 
kingdom, to eat and drink at Messiah’s table ; — the 
same accession to the society, — by the first 
resurrection sending up from Hades the souls of 
the pious dead ; — the same renovation of the earth, 
— the old Jerusalem thrown away, and replaced by 


THE APOCRYPHA . 


185 


a new and heavenly ; — the same metamorphosis of 
mortal men, — to be as the angels ; — the same end 
to Messiah’s time, — the second resurrection, and the 
‘second judgment of eternity,’ consigning the 
wicked angels to their doom ; — and the same new 
creation, transforming the heavenly world, that it 
may answer to Paradise below. Here, in a book to 
which the New Testament itself appeals, we have 
the very drama of ‘ last things ’ which reappears in 
the book of Revelation and in portions of the Gos- 
pels.” 

And now I would that I had time to gather up 
the scattered hints which I have found in all these 
books of the Apocrypha, together with the book of 
Enoch , and to add to them such others as we might 
discover in the Psalms of Solomon and in the Sib- 
ylline books, in Aristobulus and Philo Judaeus, and 
in the Talmudic Mishna, — I would that I could 
gather all these hints together so that you might 
see how gradual but sure the evolution was, from 
Malachi to Jesus, of that social and ecclesiastical 
environment in the midst of which the life and 
character of Jesus were developed, and the ideas 
moral and spiritual and theological which formed 
the bulk of his own teachings, and of his dis- 
ciples, in the infant Church. So doing, I could 
forge the missing link necessary to connect these 
distant centuries of Jewish culture in an indissoluble 
unity. So doing, I could show that Christianity 
was no interpolation from a supernatural sphere 
into the natural and human order of events, but the 
result of forces wholly natural and human ; that the 


1 86 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


teachings of J esus and his apostles involved no sudden 
and astounding revolution of existing manners and 
beliefs, but simply . embodied elements that 
were alive and germinant on every side. That 
thus I could account for Jesus as the third person 
of the Trinity, or for the doctrine of the atone- 
ment in its present form, or for the special doctrines 
of the Roman Catholic Church, I shall not certainly 
pretend, for these are nowhere to be found in 
the New Testament. These too were gradually 
evolved ; some of them in a few, but others in the 
course of many centuries. But to understand the 
literature and history of the times immediately pre- 
ceding, and contemporaneous with, the first Christian 
phenomena, is to understand, that to speak of the 
natural origin of Christianity is as allowable and as 
inevitable as to speak of the natural origin of any fruit 
that ever grew on tree or vine. Doubtless in either 
process there is involved a divine, an infinite element. 
But in neither is it an irruption from an external 
sphere, but simply that divine and infinite element 
which is involved in every stage of evolution, from 
the inorganic nebulae up to the conscious thought 
and love of the undying sons of God. 


SIXTH LECTURE. 

THE NEW TESTAMENT: THE EPISTLES. 

As in my first lecture on the Old Testament, 1 
indicated briefly, the nature of the process by which 
the Old Testament canon was formed, and came to 
be regarded of supreme and supernatural import- 
ance, so in this lecture, my first on the New Testa- 
ment, by way of introduction, I shall say a few 
words on the formation of the New Testament. It 
is permitted us in this instance to follow the process 
of formation more carefully than in the case of the 
Old Testament. From the way in which the New 
Testament is commonly regarded, one would suppose 
that it came down from heaven as the Koran of the 
Moslem fable did, in a single night ; that it was 
written either by the hand of the Almighty or at 
his immediate dictation. But what we find to be the 
truth is, that for centuries after they were written 
the New Testament books were regarded as belong- 
ing to a different order from the Old. A Jew would 
have been shocked hardly more than a Christian at 
the idea of putting them on a level with Old Testa- 
ment Scriptures. Oral tradition was esteemed of 
greater value than the written gospels or Epistles. 
Strangely enough the first mention of any part of 
the New Testament as Scripture is within the limits 

187 


1 88 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

of the New Testament itself, in the second Epistle 
of Peter* But this Epistle is the latest book of the 
New Testament, its date, as we shall see, about 170, 
A. D. After this, references to parts of the New 
Testament as Scripture grow more and more fre- 
quent, but the term is equally applied to other 
writings which were not finally incorporated in the 
New Testament. The earliest list of New Testament 
books that we come upon is that of the heretic Mar- 
cion, 144, A. D. It includes ten of Paul's Epistles. 
Thirty years later all of these were still rejected by 
an important section of the Church. Several lists 
date from the close of the second and the beginning 
of the third century. None of these contain all the 
books now in the New Testament, but they contain 
others not in it. Speaking of this period Dr. David- 
son says, “ The infancy of the canon was cradled 
in an uncritical age and rocked with traditional 
ease. Of the three fathers who contributed most to 
its early growth, Iren aeus was credulous, Tertu Ilian 
passionate and one-sided, and Clement of Alexan- 
dria was mainly occupied with ecclesiastical eth- 
ics.” “ No analysis of the different books was 
seriously attempted. In its absence custom, acci- 
dent, taste, practical needs directed the tendency of 
tradition.” “Their decisions were much more the re- 
sult of pious feeling biased by their theological 
speculations than the conclusions of a sound judg- 
ment.” In the year 332, A. D., the Emperor Con- 
stantine entrusted Eusebius with authority to make 
out a complete collection of the sacred Christian 

* Chapter ill. 16. 


THE NEW TESTAMENT. 1 89 

writings for the use of the Catholic Church Ap- 
parently the list contained all that is now in the 
New Testament, except the Apocalypse . He thus 
admitted several books which he allows were con- 
troverted in his time, James , 2 Peter , Jude , 2 and 3 
John . In other instances, the tradition or opinion 
of the churches was the only ground of his decision. 
The Council of Laodicea, 363, A. D. is commonly 
credited with having accepted as canonical all of 
the books now in the New Testament, except the 
Apocalypse and no others. But the sixtieth canon 
of the Council, which contains the decision, has been 
proved to be a forgery of much later date. The 
first Council of Carthage, 397, A. D., is in reality the 
first authentic instance of the acceptance of our pre- 
sent books and no others, as canonical. But even 
then, the decision of the Council did not represent 
either the agreement of the scholars, or the unani- 
mous opinion of the churches. Jerome and Augus- 
tine, the two most influential scholars of the time, 
were much divided. Many of the books thus voted 
in were almost universally rejected : the Epistle to 
the Hebrews in the Latin Church, the Apocalypse in 
the Greek, second of Peter and Jude and James, and 
two of John’s Epistles. But even this brilliant tour de 
force did not settle the matter finally. Books voted 
out by the Council were still read in the churches, 
and books voted in were still regarded with suspicion. 
And it must always be remembered that the same 
Council which fixed the New Testament canon, de- 
clared canonical the whole of the Old Testament 
Apocrypha as it is now accepted by the Roman 


IQO THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY . 

Catholic Church. The Protestant reformers were 
far from unanimity in regard to the rightful canoni- 
city and value of the New Testament books. “The 
fourth book of Esdras ,” said Luther, “ I toss into 
the Elbe,” and he put the Apocalypse on the same 
level. The Epistle of James he considered “ a right- 
strawy Epistle.” Calvin denied the Pauline author- 
ship of Hebrews, and the Petrine authorship of sec- 
ond Peter , but allowed the right of both to be in 
the New Testament. 

Such is the story of New Testament canonicity. 
Such were the accidents and the vicissitudes to 
which the New Testament writings were subjected 
before they arrived at the position of supernatural 
and infallible authority. Nowhere along the line 
have we a particle of evidence of any supernatural 
guidance or illumination which enabled those who 
judged between these books and others to decide 
which were, and which were not, of superhuman 
origin. The most various motives contributed to 
the arrangement finally agreed upon. Some were 
prudential, others were superstitious. Few, almost 
none, were critical. The Roman Catholic assumes 
that there was supernatural guidance of the Church 
to her decision. The Protestant, denying this, — as 
well he may, for it has not a particle of evidence — 
is forced to the conclusion that the determination of 
the limits of infallibity and inspiration was left to 
be decided in the course of several centuries by men 
of dubious character and doubtful scholarship, or by 
the superstitions and the passions of the crowd. 
Surely, such a conclusion ought to hush forever all 


THE EPISTLES. 


IQI 

the arrogant assumptions that are made upon this 
head and all the petty taunts which orthodoxy 
hurls at those who feel obliged to go behind the 
superstitions and opinions of the early church 
to test every book by scientific methods, and to ac- 
cord to each particular part so much of reverence 
and authority as it demands on its intrinsic merits. 

The contents of the New Testament are made up 
of three sorts of writings : Biographical history, in- 
cluding the four Gospels and the Acts ; Epistolary 
documents, including the Epistles ascribed to Paul, 
Peter, James, John and Jude; a book of prophecy, 
known as the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. 
John the Divine. As in the Old Testament, so here 
I shall observe a rough chronological order and 
treat of the Epistles first because they were for the 
most part written before the other books. Of the 
Epistles, fourteen are ascribed to Paul, one to 
James, two to Peter, three to John, and one to 
Jude. Of the fourteen ascribed to Paul, of which I 
shall speak exclusively this evening, only thirteen 
are so ascribed to him in the text of the 
Epistle; the fourteenth, that to the Hebrews, is 
ascribed to him only in the superscription, and the 
present superscriptions of the New Testament books 
are of much later date than the books themselves. 
The authenticity of three others, those to Timothy 
and Titus, was for some time doubtful in the early 
church, but the remaining ten were generally con- 
sidered as unquestionably Pauline. Modern criti- 
cism has not, however, been content with confirm- 
ing the doubts of the early church in regard to He- 


192 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


brews , Timothy , and Titus , but has, furthermore, im- 
peached the authenticity of Ephesians , Colossians , 
Philippians , Philemon , and TJiessalonians. In regard 
to these, however, there is much difference of 
opinion. Only the most destructive criticism re- 
jects them all. Ephesians fares the worst, Colossians 
next. Many who accept First TJiessalonians , reject 
Second. Even the authenticity of Romans, Corin- 
thians , and Galatians has been denied by Bruno 
Bauer, a very different person from F. C. Baur, the 
great Tubingen critic. But his denial is almost an 
argument for anything that he denies. The nomi- 
nal Epistles of Paul may properly be classed under 
four heads, those certainly Pauline, Romans , Corin- 
thians, Galatians ; those doubtfully Pauline, in the 
order of their doubtfulness, from more to less : 
Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, second Thessalo- 
nians, Philemon, first TJiessalonians ; those almost 
certainly not Pauline : the two to Timothy and one 
to Titus; one very certainly not the Apostle’s: the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. Strangely enough, this 
gradation of authenticity has been preserved in the 
arrangement of the Pauline Epistles.* First we have 
the impregnable four ; Romans, the two Corinthians, 
and Galatians ; next the doubtful, led off as they 
should be, by Ephesians ; then the more doubtful 
pastorals to Timothy and Titus, and the most 
doubtful, Hebrews, last of all. I will first consider 
them in the order in which they are printed and 
afterward state (approximately) their proper chrono- 
logical order. 

* Except that Philemon follows the pastorals, which it should pre- 
cede. 


THE EPISTLES . 


193 


By doing so, however, we get the best wine at 
the beginning of the feast. The Epistle to the 
Romans is Paul’s great Epistle' his greatest, 
whether with Baur we allow him only four, or 
with the extreme apologists ascribe to him all 
the fourteen. When was it written? Probably in 
the year 58, A. D. And where ? At Corinth, where 
the Apostle lingered for awhile on hfs way up 
to Jerusalem for the last time, to carry his con- ( 
tributions for the saints, and for thanks be set upon 
by Jewish-Christians, and through their machina- 
tions sent a prisoner to Rome. His other letters 
for the most part were addressed to churches which 
he had founded. But in 58 he had never been in 
Rome. The church there was not of his founding. 
Apparently it had taken its rise there in the Jewish 
ghetto eight or ten years before the writing of this 
letter. Two circumstances everywhere contributed 
to the growth of Christian missions : the extension 
of the Roman Empire and the colonial dispersion 
of the Jews. There was a little cluster of them in 
every large city or considerable town, and to them 
the Christian missionaries made their first appeal. 
Already in the reign of Claudius which ended in 54, 

A. D., a reported insurrection of the Jews “ at the 
instigation of one Chrestus,” points at the excite- 
ment of the Jewish community attendant on the 
preaching of the new religion. Suetonius says that 
Claudius cleared the Jews out of the city ; but if he 
did they soon came back and Christianity with 
them, so that in 58 there was a flourishing Christian 
church there of predominantly Jewish tendencies, 


i 9 4 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


made up principally of Jews and Gentiles who had 
become Jewish proselytes before embracing Chris- 
tianity. But the church also contained persons who 
had been converted to Christianity directly from 
paganism, and apparently Paul wrote his Epistle at 
the instigation of some of these, to conciliate in 
their behalf the converted Jews and Jewish pros- 
elytes. 

This Epistle, the great fountain-head of Chris- 
tian theology, the source of woes innumerable 
to Christendom, has often been regarded as an 
Epistle written in pure space, — a didactic composi- 
tion setting forth the doctrinal system of the apos- 
tle, quite independently of any special circum- 
stances of the time when it was written, or the 
place to which it was directed. But a composition 
of this sort is entirely foreign to the general char- 
acter of Paul’s Epistles which are all, unless this be 
an exception, written for a special purpose, to meet 
a special emergency. “ So fight I,” said he, “ not 
as one that beateth the air.” Even the idea of 
Renan, that the body of this Epistle was written as 
an encyclical letter, and as such ended at Chapter 
XIII. 15, is not admissible. The chances are that 
the Epistle was written to meet an emergency as 
definite as that which occasioned the Epistle to the 
Galatians or those to the Corinthians. The Jewish 
Christians were troubled and offended by the direct 
admission of the Gentiles into the privileges of the 
new religion. “ What advantage then hath the 
Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision?” 
This was the question that had been propounded. 


THE EPISTLES. 


195 


and the Epistle to the Romans is the Apostle’s an- 
swer. It must be confessed that in this answer 
there is abundant justification for the doctrines of 
election and reprobation as set forth by Calvin and 
Edwards, but as philosophical doctrines only. The 
practical outcome of his system was entirely differ- 
ent from theirs ; in his case universalism, in their 
case partialism. But never was the doctrine that 
might, the Almighty might, makes right set forth 
more frankly. Because God had the might he had 
the right to include Gentile as well as Jew in his 
great scheme of mercy. And with the right he had 
the disposition. It is at this point that Paul di- 
verges from Calvin and Edwards. His God, like 
theirs, is an absolute despot ; a law unto himself ; 
his arbitrary will not to be questioned. But where- 
as their despot-god is a monster of cruelty, damning 
the great majority of men to everlasting burnings, 
his despot-god is kind and fatherly, and decrees the 
universal salvation of mankind. 

It may well be doubted whether Paul’s answer to 
the Roman Jewish-Christians was as satisfactory to 
them as to himself. For a century after his death 
he was of no account among them, and then, after 
a brief resurrection, his name and influence vanished 
for a thousand years. No one, he told these Jewish 
Christians, ever had been saved by the works of the 
law. The law was given for the very purpose of 
increasing sin, so that God’s glory might appear the 
more in overcoming it. No wonder that the Ebion- 
ites, the Judaizing Christians of the first and second 
century, hated Paul, and identified him with Simon 


THE BIBLE OF TO- DA Y. 


196 

Magus as th enemy of Peter, the great typical 
representative of Jewish Christianity. 

Paul’s argument in this Epistle, it must be al- 
lowed, is very bald and harsh, and poorly justifies 
the end he has in view. It is the end that justifies 
the argument. His motive was so good that we 
forget the clumsy rabbinism and absurd philosophy 
to which he resorted to convince his head of that 
with which his heart was full to overflowing. And, 
say what you will of it, twice has this Epistle, with 
its all-pervading doctrine of justification by faith, 
been a charter of emancipation to mankind. It made 
Christianity independent of Judaism in the first 
instance ; it made Protestantism independent of 
Romanism in the second. And here it must be 
said that Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith was 
not that doctrine which to-day appeals to him for 
confirmation. It was not the doctrine of salvation 
by an opinion or a notion or an ecstasy about the 
blood of Christ. At the same time it must be con- 
ceded that by “ the works of the law,” which could 
not save, he meant, not merely the works of the 
Jewish ritual law, but also works of the moral law 
done with a view to justification. His thought 
was this : This law is so universal that no one can 
help violating it at one time or another. Where- 
fore it isn’t the amount of right-doing, but the 
steady inward purpose of our hearts to die to sin 
and live to righteousness that justifies and saves. 
And here, of course, the shadow of Antinomianism 
fell across his path. “ Shall we continue in sin that 
grace may abound?” “God forbid,” he cries. 


THE EPISTLES '. 


*97 

And, though here his argument is very thin and 
vague, he leaves no crumb of comfort lying round 
for those who talk of “ mere morality 1 ” Paul is 
intensely moral. “ Let everyone who nameth the 
name of Christ depart from iniquity.” Matthew 
Arnold has truly said that this sentence is the key- 
note of all his teaching. He never offered pre- 
miums upon immorality as Luther did by saying, 
that if a man had faith he might “ deflower the 
Virgin Mary,” and it should not be accounted 
unto him for sin. 

The Epistle to the Romans is made up of three 
parts. Chapters I. to VIII., set forth the doctrine of 
justification by faith. Chapters IX. to Xi. attempt to 
reconcile this doctrine with the Jewish sentiment 
of Israel’s special calling. According to Baur these 
chapters are the back-bone of the Epistle. They 
indicate the occasion of its being sent to Rome. 
What goes before is the foundation of this super- 
structure. Chapters XII. to XVI. are practical and hor- 
tatory. The letter, properly speaking, ends at XV., 
13. The rest is a personal postscript. The sixteenth 
chapter cannot be regarded as belongingto the origi- 
nal epistle. The persons named do not belong in 
Rome or could not have been there at this time. If 
it is Paul’s, it is the modified ending of some other 
Epistle ; possibly of one sent to the Ephesians. 

What is called “ The first Epistle to the Corin- 
thians ” in the New Testament is not the first Epis- 
tle that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. A former 
Epistle is referred to in this. That such an Epistle 
should have been lost, but ill comports with the 


3 9 8 THE BIBLE OF TO- DA V 

mechanical theory of inspiration and the miraculous 
guardianship which is supposed to have preserved 
the writings of the Apostles ; hut the saying of 
Emerson : 

“ One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world hath never lost.” 

must not be interpreted too literally. The letter 
which we call the first was written from Ephesus in 
the spring of 5 7, A. IX, not from Philippi as the sub- 
scription states. Never was a letter written with a 
more direct reference than this to the immediate 
time and place for which it was intended, and hence 
the folly of applying its injunction to all times and 
to all places, as if it had been written as an ency- 
clical letter to all the Christian churches that have 
existed from Paul's day to our own. Word had 
come to the Apostle that there were various divisions 
and immoralities in the church at Corinth, and his 
letter is a letter of rebuke and warning and advice. 
The first four chapters treat of the divisions in the 
church ; the next six treat of the immoralities of 
a more private nature that have made their appear- 
ance ; the next four, of the public conduct of the 
new converts, and the next two and concluding of 
the resurrection of the dead. Primitive Christianity 
is often spoken of as an ideal society which modern 
Christianity would do well to reproduce, but the 
primitive Christianity of Corinth does not appear in 
any gracious, beautiful or winning light in Paul’s 
Epistle. On the contrary the church which Paul had 
founded with so much affection, and labored for with 
so much earnestness, and yearned over with so much 


THE EPISTLES. 


1 99 


tenderness, was given over to contentiousness, fanat- 
icism and impurity. Everywhere in Paul's least 
doubtful Epistles do we find him fighting the same 
battle of Christian liberty, against the same foes, — 
the J udaizing Christians. According to Baur we have 
the first stage of this battle in the Epistle to the 
Galatians, the second in the two Epistles to the 
Corinthians, the third stage in the Epistle to the 
Romans. In Galatians the demand of the Jewish 
Christians is that every Gentile Christian shall be 
circumcised ; in Corinthians that the Gentiles who 
come in shall refrain from eating meats which 
have been offered to idols ; in Romans , that the 
superiority of a Jewish over a Gentile Christian 
shall somehow be made apparent. We have here a 
logical order and Baur contends that it was also 
chronological. But it may be the Judaizers adopted 
different tactics in the different churches, or that the 
same difficulties did not come uppermost in every 
church. Only one thing is certain, that whatever 
Paul’s thorn in the flesh was, his thorn in the spirit 
was the Jewish Christian party which beset him 
everywhere, and which was inspired directly by the 
Apostolic Judaizers at Jerusalem, with James, the 
brother of Jesus, at their head. The trouble in 
Corinth had been stirred up by emissaries from 
Jerusalem bringing letters of commendation from 
Peter and James. The Jerusalem Christianity was 
Judaism plus the faith that Jesus was the actual 
Messiah. A good Christian was a complete Jew and 
something added. But Paul was of a different 
opinion. For him the law had been abolished. His 


200 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

Christianity was purity of heart and life. He recog- 
nized no other. There has been much discussion as 
to whether there were four parties corresponding to 
the four watchwords, “ I am of Paul, I of Apollos, I 
of Cephas and I of Christ.” The conclusion that 
there were only two, seems the most reasonable. 
Paul and Apollos stood alike for Christian liberty. 
The Petrine Judaizers tried to monopolize the 
leadership of Christ. Those who said, “ I am pf 
Cephas,” and “ I of Christ ” were all of one party. 
Paul knew that it was just as easy for narrowness 
and bigotry to shelter themselves behind the name of 
Christ as behind any other. It was so then and it is 
so now. Very likely the Petrine party called itself 
“ of Christ ” because it emphasized the Messiahship 
of Jesus, which already in Paul’s doctrine had be- 
come overshadowed by larger and more individual 
conceptions. 

Partisanship was the first evil attacked by the 
Apostle ; the next licentiousness ; then the abuse of 
the Lord’s Supper. At first the poor had shared 
the bounty of the rich. Now the rich ate their own 
food, and drank their own wine ; drank themselves 
drunken, and the poor looked on and went hungry 
and sober. Another evil was that the Corinthian 
Christians took their disputes for settlement to the 
civil courts, instead of settling them among them- 
selves. Whether Christians should marry was an 
important question. Paul thought not, in view of 
the approaching end of the existing order of the world. 
But he conceded marriage to the grossly passionate. 
In view of the impending catastrophe slaves were 


THE EPISTLES. 


201 


exhorted to submission. Should a Christian eat of 
meat which had been offered to idols and afterward 
exposed for sale ? Paul answered in the affirmative. 
Should a Christian eat and drink at feasts in pagan 
temples ? Paul answered in the negative. Should 
a Christian, at a private entertainment, eat the flesh 
of animals that had been dedicated to an idol ? Paul 
answered, He should ask no questions, but if told 
that such or such a dish had been offered to an idol 
then he should abstain : which sounds a little Jesuiti- 
cal. “ Speaking with tongues” was a still more im- 
portant matter. This apparently consisted in pour- 
ing forth a stream of inarticulate, incoherent gibber- 
ish, upon which nevertheless a certain value seems 
to have been set. Paul, however, regards it as the 
least of “ spiritual gifts ” and even puts “ teaching 
and preaching ” above “ miracles ” — and love still 
higher. The twelfth chapter of this Epistle has fre- 
quently been quoted as a proof that miracles were 
common in the Apostolic age. But the most search- 
ing criticism would seem to show that the word here 
and elsewhere translated miracles has not in Paul’s 
Epistles any such meaning as is commonly ascribed 
to it.* That Paul regarded these “ powers ” as super- 
natural is not denied. But so he did the gift of 
tongues. 

The second canonical letter to the Corinthians is 
a natural continuation of the first. It is possible 
but hardly probable that another letter w?s lost, 
written between this and the letter we have been 
considering. This was written in Macedonia, a few 

*For an exhaustive discussion of this matter, see Supernatural 
Religion, Vol. III. 


202 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


months after the first and not long before the Apos- 
tle’s three months sojourn in Corinth, during which 
he wrote his letter to the Romans. The letter di- 
vides itself naturally into three parts, the first of 
which (Chapters I. to VII.) is mainly personal, giving 
an account of the Apostle’s doings and feelings 
since his former letter, what he had heard from the 
Corinthians, and finally a stout assertion of the dig- 
nity of his Apostolic office. The second part (Chap- 
ters VIII. and IX.) relates to the contributions for the 
poor Christians in Judea, and endeavors to excite the 
generosity of the Corinthians by various appeals and 
promises. The third part (Chapters X. to XIII.) 
reveals the principal object for which the letter was 
written, namely: to vindicate Paul’s Apostolic dig- 
nity, and to denounce the enemies who underrated 
it. We have nowhere in the New Testament any 
piece of writing that is more vigorous than this, 
none where we feel the heart of the Apostle beating 
so hot beneath the tortuous lines. From the fierce- 
ness of his rejoinder we can judge how harsh the 
enmity to which he was exposed. Vain, boastful, 
arrogant, you may call it if you will, and I shall not 
deny that it is so, but it is the vanity, the boastful- 
ness, the arrogance of a great, loving heart ; of a man 
who knew the will of God, and could not bear to 
have it frustrated by the ecclesiastical Turveydrops 
who knew not what manner of spirit the religion 
was of, of which they would fain have the exclusive 
charge. Nothing can be plainer, as we read this let- 
ter, than that there was no love lost between Paul 
and “ James, the brother of the Lord,” and the Jeru- 


THE EPISTLES , . 


203 


s*alem Apostles, Nothing can be plainer than that 
J ames and these denied the claim of Paul to be con- 
sidered an Apostle, urging that he had never known 
the living or the risen Jesus. He does not speak 
of them with soft and pretty words. He is a master 
of irony, and the Jerusalem Apostles are compelled 
to feel its sting. “ We dare not,” he says, “ make 
ourselves of the number or compare ourselves with 
some that commend themselves, and measure them- 
selves by themselves.” “ The over-much Apostles ” 
he calls them, a phrase which our translation softens 
into “ the very chiefest,” Again, dropping his irony, 
he calls them “ false Apostles, deceitful workers, 
transforming themselves into the Apostles of 
Christ.” “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are 
they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they 
the ministers of Christ? I am more. In labors 
more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons 
more frequent, in deaths oft.” And then follows 
that enumeration of the items of “ Paul’s salary,” 
as one of blessed memory taught me to call it long 
ago. “Of the Jews five times received I forty 
stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, 
once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a 
night and a day I have been in the deep. In jour- 
neyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of rob- 
bers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by 
the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the 
wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils (notice the 
climax of them all) in perils among false brethren.” 
How deep the wound that made this lion roar so 
piteously! He is himself ashamed of his own cry. 


204 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


“ I am become a fool in glorying,” he says, “ but ye 
have compelled me. For you ought to have com- 
mended me, (and not have forced me to do it my- 
self) for in nothing am I behind the over-much 
Apostles, though I be nothing.” Then comes an- 
other touch of irony. “For what is it wherein ye 
were inferior to other churches, except it be that I 
myself was no expense to you? Forgive me this 
wrong .” This does not seem to be the language of 
a saint. But it is better. It is the language of a 
man ; a man whose faults are more endearing to us 
than the virtues of the narrow-minded formal- 
ists who did their best to poison the affections of 
the churches he had nourished with the blood of 
his great heart. 

The Epistle to the Galatians stood at the 
head of Marcion’s list of Paul’s Epistles, and it is 
the opinion of Baur that it should still stand there 
as the earliest, mainly because it seems to represent 
an earlier and cruder stage of Paul’s great contro- 
versy with the Judaizing Christians, which runs 
through all that are indubitably his. But its tone 
and manner ally it most closely with second Cor- 
inthians. The most reasonable conclusion seems to 
be that it was written at Corinth, early in 58, A. D., 
soon after second Corinthians , and just before the 
Epistle to the Romans. The subscription is “To 
the Galatians from Rome,” but this is in every way 
unreasonable and difficult to believe. The sub- 
scriptions to the Epistles, as I have said before, 
are generally worthless. From first to last the 
Epistle represents another phase of the great 


THE EPISTLES. 


205 


conflict between Paul’s inclusiveness and the nar- 
rowness of the Jerusalem Apostles. It is the 
touch-stone by which we shall yet try the book 
of Acts , and find it almost wholly wanting in 
historic truth. Paul had founded the Galatian 
church in 52, A. D. ; he had visited it again in 55. 
Paul does not here, as in his second letter to the 
Corinthians, reserve his pent-up indignation till the 
last. At the very outset he discharges his full soul 
of all its wrath and bitterness, of all its hoard of 
righteous indignation and afterward, when he has 
somewhat spent the fury of his heart, he proceeds 
to matters doctrinal and practical. His Apostle- 
ship has been again denied, because he was not one 
of the original twelve, or had not received from 
them his commission, and in the opening verse he 
reasserts his claim and glories in the fact that his 
Apostleship is not derived from James and Peter: 
“ Paul an Apostle, not of men , neither by man , but 
by Jesus Christ and God the Father.” Then in the 
first and second chapters he goes on to show that 
he had never derived his knowledge or authority 
from the Jerusalem Apostles, and that he had never 
subjected himself to them, “ no, not for an hour.” 
We have plenty of Paul’s characteristic irony here. 
w Them which were of reputation,” he calls the 
Jerusalem Apostles ; and again, “these who seemed 
to be somewhat, (Whatsoever they were it makes 
no difference to me:) for they who seemed to be 
somewhat in conference added nothing to me ; ” 
and a little further on, “And when James and 
Peter and John who seemed to be pillars .” Else- 


20 6 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


where* he speaks of them in terms the force of 
which is lost in our translation, and which “ ears po- 
lite ” could hardly entertain if their full force were 
given. The contest in Galatia was apparently a very 
narrow one. It was narrowed down to the denial of 
Paul’s Apostleship, and the demand for circum- 
cision as a necessary part of Christianity. To be a 
Christian, the Gentile must first become a Jew. 
How often since that day have those immortal 
words, in which Paul summoned the Galatians to 
be steadfast and immovable, rung in the ears of 
other men, sore tempted as they were, to abjure 
their Christian liberty and go back to “ the beggarly 
elements of the law : ” “ Stand fast therefore in the 
liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be 
not entangled again in the yoke of bondage.” 
Surely he could not have put himself in more de- 
cided opposition to the claim of the Jerusalem 
Apostles. “ Behold, I, Paul, say unto you, that if 
ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing.” 
But how loving and how tender he could be, 
this man who could be such a flame of indigna- 
tion ! The loud allegro dies away into the softest 
possible andante . How touching too is that eleventh 
verse of the sixth chapter, ruined in our transla- 
tion where it runs, “ Ye see how large a letter I 
have written you with mine own hand.” It should 
read, “Ye see in what big letters I have written you 
with „ my own hand.” Is this the language of 
apology or self-congratulation? The former, I 
should say. The fingers used to holding sail-cloth 
* Gal., v. f 12. 


THE EPISTLES L 


207 


and tent-cloth were little skilled in penmanship. 
Nevertheless, contrary to his custom, he had writ- 
ten this letter himse.f to prove his love for the 
Galatians. We can almost see the awkward char- 
acters in which the previous verse was written, so 
that this one was suddenly obtruded. Thanks for 
such little helps, that make the Apostle a living, 
human man to us across the waste of eighteen 
hundred years ! 

In our New Testament, Ephesians immediately 
follows Galatians ; but the difference between the 
two of thought, of atmosphere, of spirit, of idea, is 
so great, that many critics who can by no means go 
with Baur in his dismissal of all the Epistles, except 
the four already named, as non-Pauline, agree that 
this must be denied the honor of his authorship. 
Was it written to the Ephesians? Some of the 
earliest Mss. omit the words “at Ephesus” in the 
first verse. The internal evidence is, however, 
much more reliable, and this is strongly adverse to 
its Ephesian destination, if Paul was the author of 
it. But if he was not, then there is no good reason 
to suppose that it was not written to the Ephesians 
by someone else. The reasons for believing that 
it was not are various and conclusive. Its resem- 
blance to Colossians is remarkable, and of such a 
nature as bespeaks a copy rather than a sponta 
neous reproduction. It abounds in unapostolic 
words and phrases. The style of writing is redund- 
ant and verbose, whereas Paul’s words always seem 
too few for his ideas ; his vocabulary insufficient to 
express his thought. Again, the letter does not 


208 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 

betray any specific purpose. The doctrine of 
Christ’s nature is certainly developed here beyond 
the point which it has reached in Romans , the latest 
of Paul’s four great Epistles. But, accepting first 
Thessalonians as genuine,* from this to Romans 
there is a decided development, and there is no rea- 
son why this should not have gone on still further. 
In this Epistle we are already in the circle of ideas 
called Gnostic, which was so important in the sec- 
ond century. Those ideas are here dimly descried. 
For this reason Baur would date the Epistle from 
the second century. But may not the germs of 
Gnosticism (the resolution of the human Christ into 
an ideal and metaphysical conception) have been of 
earlier date than Baur imagines? May not Paul 
himself, as Marcion thought, have been the first 
progenitor of the Gnostic system? Aside from 
these considerations the un-Pauline origin is plain 
enough, and the date fixed by Davidson (about 7 5 
A. D.) approximately correct. The principal difficulty 
in the way of this conclusion for an ordinary reader is 
the apparent incongruity between the moral dignity 
and beauty of the letter, and the idea that its au- 
thor pretended to be the Apostle. But again I 
must insist that it will never do to import our no- 
tions of the right of property in ideas into the early 
Christian and preceding centuries. Pseudonymous 
writing was the order of the day. The Christian 
father Irenaeus speaks of “an Infinite number of 
Apocryphal books and adulterated Scriptures.” The 
most of these were written with the best intentions. 

* See grounds for this below. 


THE EPISTLES. 


20Q 

The end was thought to justify the means. Noth* 
ing is surer than that writings characterized by the 
profoundest moral earnestness were frequently put 
forth as those of men who were entirely innocent of 
them, and had perhaps been centuries dead. Why 
this Epistle was thus fabricated is not wholly plain. 
Possibly because Paul had written no epistle to the 
Ephesians, and the writer wished to supply the de- 
ficiency. He could appreciate the genius of his 
master, but he could not re-produce the spontaneity 
and force and passion of his inimitable thought. 

The Epistle to the Philippians is declared by 
Baur to be equally un-Pauline with that to the 
Ephesians, and mainly for the same reason : that its 
ideas of Christ’s nature betray too much familiarity 
with Gnostic speculations, which were the special 
characteristic of the second century. The argu- 
ment appears to me inadequate. We have here I 
think the ring of the true Pauline metal. If Gnos- 
tic ideas are apparent, if the conception of Christ is 
more transcendental than elsewhere, I prefer to find 
the dawn of these ideas here, rather than a mere re- 
flection of their later fulness. The Epistle was 
Paul’s latest ; written in 63, A. D., at Rome, not long 
before his death. As his life grew less active he 
grew more meditative, and his speculations on the 
nature of Christ became freer and bolder. The let- 
ter is intensely individual and personal. It is the 
very Paul of second Corinthians and Galatians who 
writes (ill., 2.) “ Beware of dogs, beware of evil 
workers, beware of the concision. For we are the 
circumcision who worship God in the spirit, and re- 


210 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


joice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the 
flesh.” The development of Paul’s ideas from 
Romans to Philippians is no greater than from first 
Thessalonians to Romans. 

The Epistle to the Colossians is a near relative of 
that to the Philippians, and its authenticity has 
been impeached for the same reasons. The Gnos- 
tic element comes out more clearly here than in 
either Ephesians or Philippians. We stand upon 
the threshold of the Logos doctrine in the proem 
to the fourth Gospel. The Christology of the syn- 
optic gospels, and even of Paul’s earliest Epistle, is 
already far behind us. We are fairly set out on 
that voyage which will end at the great Council of 
Nicaea, when Christ will be identified with God. 
Accepting this Epistle as St. Paul’s, it must be con- 
fessed, if the deity of Christ cannot be inferred from 
it, no more can his humanity. Our most conserv- 
ative Unitarianism is timid and heretical in its 
Christology compared with this Christology of Paul. 
Whether the windy speculations of the great Apos- 
tle, chafing in his imprisonment, and taking refuge 
in a metaphysical theology from the regrets and 
tortures of a great career untimely thwarted, are to 
be made the standard of a rational conception of 
the personality of Jesus, is a question which ea£h 
man of us must answer for himself. The argument 
of Baur against the authenticity of this Epistle is 
strong, but it is not conclusive. What has been 
said of the Philippians applies as well to this. If it 
is Paul’s, the Epistle must have been written from 
Rome, in 62, A. D. 


THE EPISTLES. 


21 1 


Next in our New Testaments come the two let- 
ters to the Thessalonians. The authenticity of 
both has been seriously questioned by Baur and 
other critics, but it is a significant fact that Hilgen- 
feld, the ablest of Baur’s followers, has reinstated 
the first as genuine, while pushing the second into 
the last years of the Emperor Trajan, in the second 
decade of the second century. The authenticity of 
the second Epistle is much more easily impeached 
than that of the first. Davidson, who allows both 
to be authentic, claims that the second was written 
prior to the first, a reasonable conclusion, if they 
are both Pauline. Though there is much that can 
be urged against the authenticity of the Epistle, 
the force of this is overcome by other considera- 
tions. Unless, then, we accept the second as Paul’s 
also, and as prior to this, this is the first of Paul’s ex- 
tant Epistles. It is a natural beginning, less rich in 
thought and style than any that succeed it. It 
consists of two parts ; the first a sort of jubilee over 
the faithful Church of Thessalonica ; the second, 
words of comfort to those whose friends had fallen 
asleep before the second coming of Jesus, and of 
exhortation relative to that event, its suddenness 
and possible nearness. The expectation of the 
second coming had evidently demoralized the social 
order. The letter, if authentic, was probably writ- 
ten from Corinth, in the year 53, A. D. The sec- 
ond, if authentic, was written in the previous year 
and from Berea. But the objections to its authen- 
ticity are much more weighty here than with the 
first Epistle. The doctrine of anti-Christ developed 


2 12 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


in Chapter II., I to 12, affords the principal objec- 
tion. This is, with this exception, an un-Pauline 
doctrine, and seems to presuppose the Apocalypse 
or else the same or similar circumstances, which did 
not occur till after the Apostle’s death. I must 
confess that this objection to the authenticity of 
the Epistle seems to me almost insuperable. It 
was evidently written to allay the rising fear that 
the great expectation of Christ’s second coming 
was doomed to disappointment. But the idea of 
Baur that it was written soon after Paul’s death 
and almost contemporaneously with the Apoca- 
lypse, seems to me much more reasonable than the 
idea of Hilgenfeld, that it was written in the time 
of Trajan. The pseudonym of Paul would hardly 
have been chosen at so late a date, to give author- 
ity to so special an idea. 

The so-called pastoral Epistles follow next in our 
New Testament order. These are the two to 
Timothy , and the one to Titus. Their form is that of 
advice from Paul to his disciples and companions, 
Timothy and Titus, in regard to their ecclesiastical 
and personal conduct. Their authenticity has been 
freely questioned even by the most conservative 
critics. Neander, remarkable for his conservatism, 
denies the Pauline authorship of first Timothy. But 
the three Epistles have but one character, and they 
must stand or fall together. Davidson who stretches 
the limits of Pauline authorship to its utmost tension, 
so that it includes Philippians and Colossians , finds 
these beyond its pale with Hebrews and Ephesians. 
The date which he assigns to the three pastorals is 


THE EPISTLES-. 


213 


about 120 A. D. The grounds for this conclusion are 
mainly that the Epistles presuppose an ecclesiasti- 
cism much more developed, as well as certain con- 
troversies, than it could have been within the life- 
time of the Apostle. The advice to Timothy and 
Titus would have been superfluous and absurd, con- 
sidering Paul’s acquaintance with them and the con- 
fidence he had reposed in them. Some of it smacks 
of Polonius more than of the Apostle to the Gen- 
tiles. The very passages that are cited in proof of 
Paul’s authorship are manifestly realistic touches 
introduced to create an authentic appearance. It 
will be safe for us to leave these three Epistles out 
of the account in judging of Paul’s life and thought. 
But they are interesting and valuable memoirs of the 
ecclesiastical and speculative notions which pre- 
vailed in the forepart of the second century. 

The Epistle to Philemon contains only one chap- 
ter. Had it contained one less it would have been 
better for runaway slaves from Paul’s time to our 
own. The principal subject is the sending back of 
Onesimus by the Apostle to his former master. 
Some of you can well remember how this Epistle 
was the very gospel of the slave-catchers in the pro- 
slavery times and of the statesmen who quoted it in 
favor of the Fugitive Slave Bill. At the best, Paul 
is a doubtful teacher of social and political wisdom, 
but it must always be remembered that his social and 
political ethics were conditioned largely by his idea 
of the approaching end of the existing order of the 
world. Very few of us would have thought it worth 
while to destroy slavery by civil war, if we had 


214 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY. 


thought that there would be a general catastrophe 
to right that and everything else in the one hundredth 
year of the republic. The authenticity of Philemon 
has been questioned, but it was probably written by 
the Apostle in the year 62 A. D. ; the first extant of 
those he wrote during his captivity at Rome. 

We have now completed our survey of those 
Epistles which claim to be Paul’s in the opening 
verse of each. The Epistle to the Hebrews is an 
exception to this rule. If Paul did not write it, it is 
simply an anonymous, not a pseudonymous writing. 
The superscription is The Epistle of Paul the Apostle 
to the Hebrews , but in the oldest Mss., the super- 
scription is simply “ To the Hebrews.” For dignity 
and earnestness and eloquence it does not fall be- 
low the genius of St. Paul, but the eloquence is not 
of his sort, nor is the earnestness. Its Pauline 
authorship was generally denied in the early church, 
especially in the Western : not till the second coun- 
cil of Carthage, (419 A. D.,) was it admitted to the 
Canon as an Epistle of Paul. Its position as the 
last of the Epistles ascribed to him is a reminiscence 
of this tardy acknowledgement. But the critics 
went on doubting after the ecclesiastics had 
voted it Pauline. Calvin was found among the 
doubters in the sixteenth century. Since then the 
doubts have gone on steadily increasing until now 
adhesion to the Pauline authorship is the best pos- 
sible evidence that the critic is a mere apologist. 
Among those who have denied the Pauline author- 
ship there has been much difference of opinion in 
regard to the real author. Some have said Barnabas; 


THE EPISTLES. 


215 


some have said Apollos. This was Luther’s conjec- 
ture and it has found many able advocates. But it 
cannot be determined to a certainty. And it is a 
matter of curiosity rather than of vital interest or 
importance. Whoever wrote the Epistle it is still sig- 
nificant and grand enough to have an honored place 
among the anonymous writings of the New Testa- 
ment. It was addressed to Jewish Christians some- 
where; Davidson says in Alexandria, supposing it to 
have been written by Apollos. It is made up of 
two parts, doctrinal and hortatory. The nineteenth 
verse of the tenth chapter is the dividing line. The 
writer’s object is very similiar to that of Paul in the 
Epistle to the Romans, to conciliate the Jewish 
Christians, but it must be confessed that the means 
adopted are much better chosen than were those of 
Paul. The argument is that the Jewish religion, 
— -law and temple, — was a type of better things to 
come, a prototype to which Christianity was the 
antitype. The allegorical method of interpretation 
necessary to this argument is much freer and more 
fanciful than the allegorizing of Paul who indeed 
allegorizes verses here and there of the Old Testa- 
ment, but here the whole of the Old Covenant is a 
mere shadow of the Christian dispensation. In car- 
rying out this scheme Jesus is represented as a great 
high priest, unchanging and eternal, of whom the 
priesthood of the Jewish Church was but the pro- 
phecy and type. The date of the Epistle has been 
fixed by Davidson at 66 A. D. Here, as in Paul’s later 
Epistles, the Christology of the Church is on its way 
from the original humanity of Jesus to the assertion 


21 6 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


of his deity. A good deal more than half the dis- 
tance has already been passed over. Various con- 
siderations may unite to date the fourth gospel far in- 
to the second century, but its Logos doctrine is but 
a slight advance upon the Christology of Hebrews. 
The Christ of Hebrews is a super-angelic being, 
creator of the world, while at the same time his sub- 
ordination to the father is distinctly declared. The 
difference between the son and father is here how- 
ever reduced to well nigh its minimum. 

Concerning the fourteen Epistles usually ascribed 
to Paul, the net result is as follows : four are his 
\with absolute certainty, and these the most signifi- 
cant of all; First Thessalonians, Philemon, Colossians 
and Philippians, are his somewhat more doubtfully; 
Ephesians is pretty certainly not his, and second 
Thessalonians; the three pastorals more certainly not 
his, and the Epistle to the Hebrews not his very cer- 
tainly. The order in which those which can with 
perfect certainty or moderate assurance be ascribed 
to him, appeared, is as follows and at these approxi- 
mate dates: First Thessalonians , 53 A. D., first 
Corinthians 57, second Corinthians 57, Galatians 58, 
Romans 58, Philemon 62, Colossians 62, Philippians 
63. And in these eight Epistles, written by the 
Apostle to the Gentiles in the course of ten years from 
53 to 63 A. D., we have our earliest contribution to 
the history of Christian origins and one of such im- 
portance as cannot be overrated. Do not wish that 
this earliest contribution had been in biographical 
rather than in epistolary form. The unconscious 
witness is always the best witness possible. In 


THE EPISTLES. 


217 


these Epistles Paul was not writing, he was making, 
history. Little he thought that eighteen centuries 
after him the letters which he forged in the fierce 
flame of his enthusiam, sorrow, love, and indigna- 
tion would be the weapons of our petty theological 
debate. It is the unconsciousness of his testimony 
that makes it so valuable. These Epistles are bet- 
ter than any history of Christianity from 53 to 63 
A. D., could be ; they are better, too, than any bio- 
graphy or autobiography of Paul. A biography 
does not always tell the truth. If we knew Paul on- 
ly from his biography in the book of Acts, how differ- 
ent he would appear to us ; a time-server, a double- 
dealer, a hypocrite ; always upon the best of terms 
with the Jerusalem Apostles ; sharing with Peter the 
honor of first preaching the gospel to the Gentiles. 
But the unconscious testimony of the Epistles sets 
this good-natured fiction in its proper light. Even 
if Paul had written his autobiography, we should 
have no such knowledge of him as we have to-day. 
Autobiography is apt to be less true than biography. 
We praise Franklin’s for its frankness, and find that 
its apparent frankness was a blind ; its confessions of 
certain faults, concealments of yet greater. The 
unconscious testimony of Paul’s Epistles is the best 
witness we can have not only to his time but to his 
character and personality. 

Fortunately for us it is the four of most undoubted 
authenticity that are the richest in both historical 
and biographical materials. Would it be too much to 
say that they inform us of the real origin of Christian- 
ity ? Perhaps it would, but it is not too much to say 


218 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


that they inform us of that but for which Christianity 
would have hardly survived a hundred years after 
the death of Jesus. For what was Christianity as it 
was conceived by those who took special charge of 
it after the crucifixion of its founder, — the Jerusalem 
Apostles headed by “ James the brother of the 
Lord,” who cared little enough for Jesus while he 
was living, but after he was dead did. him the worst 
indignity — declaring that the whole significance of 
his career was in his messianic character ? What 
was this primitive Christianity ? Why, simply Juda- 
ism with all its circumcision, temple-service, feasts 
and formalism, plus the acknowledgment that Jesus 
was the Messiah. Apparently the one year or three 
of Jesus’ ministry had come to this when Paul saw 
the face of Stephen, “ as it were the face of an 
angel,” bruised with the paving stones with which 
the Jews had battered him to death. Is it extrava- 
gant to say that this sort of Christianity would not 
have survived a century ? that it did not deserve to 
survive even so long as that ? How many converts 
would it have made throughout the Gentile world, 
insisting upon circumcision and all the tiresome Jew- 
ish ceremonial, especially after “ the fathers had 
fallen asleep, and all things remained as they were 
from the beginning.” But with the arrival of Paul 
upon the scene of action there was a change of in- 
finite importance. Henceforth it was possible for a 
Gentile to become a Christian without first becom- 
ing a J ew. In that announcement lay in embryo the 
possibility of eighteen centuries of Greek and 
Roman and Teutonic Christianity. But this an- 


THE EPISTLES. 


219 


nouncement was not well received by the Jerusalem 
Apostles. The principal Epistles of St. Paul reflect 
on every page the harshness of their opposition. 
These excellent people who “ seemed to be pillars,’ ' 
gave the Apostle to the Gentiles no rest. They 
dogged his footsteps ; they denied his Apostleship ; 
they called his doctrine the doctrine of Balaam and 
accused him of enjoining fornication ; * even in his 
life-time they alienated his churches, and well nigh 
broke his heart. And for a long time after his death 
their machinations seemed to have succeeded. In 
the second century, till towards the end of it, Paul 
was of no account. He was given over to the Gnos- 
tic heretics, but for whom, it may be, no one of his 
Epistles would have been preserved. He was iden- 
tified with Simon Magus, and Peter was represented 
as everywhere confronting and confounding him. 
Then came reaction. It was his genius that presided 
over the early councils. It was his Epistles that fur- 
nished the weapons of theological controversy. It 
must be confessed that a great deal of harm was in 
those phrases of incipient Gnosticism which he in- 
troduced into his later writings. But we can easily 
forgive him that unconsciously he saddled Christian- 
ity with a metaphysical theology, when we remem- 
ber that but for him we should have had no Chris- 
tianity whatever. 

Accepting as Pauline the eight Epistles of which 
I am speaking, they present a most instructive les- 
son in the growth of the ideal Jesus from a purely 
human personage as he is in Thessalonians, the Jew- 

* Revelation . II, 14. 


220 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


ish Messiah of the Synoptic gospels, through the in- 
creasing grandeurs of Corinthians and Romans until 
i at length in the epistles to the Colossians and Philip - 
pians he stands upon the utmost verge of super- 
angelic power and grace, upon the mystic line where 
but a step and he is the Eternal Logos, one with 
the Eternal God. But corresponding to this devel- 
opment of the ideal Jesus we have no account in 
these Epistles of the development of the actual 
Jesus. Only twenty years have passed since his 
death and how precious would be any tradition of 
his person or his character at such a brief remove. 
But alas ! forty or fifty years must pass after the 
last of these Epistles has been written, ere the first 
gospel * which shall be handed down the centuries 
shall see the light. And in the meantime Paul is 
almost absolutely silent concerning the actual life of 
Jesus. Once and once only does he quote his words. 
He does not make a single reference to any event in 
his whole life. It must be confessed that the Christ 
of Paul was not a person but an idea. He took no 
pains to learn the facts about the individual Jesus. 
He actually boasted that he got nothing from the 
Apostles. His Christ was an ideal conception, 
evolved from his own feeling and imagination, and 
taking on new powers and attributes from year to 
year to suit each new emergency. But, although so 
silent concerning the life of Jesus, he is talkative 
enough about his death and resurrection, and those 
to whom the death of Jesus is of infinitely more im- 
portance than his life find in his words abundant 

* In anything like its present form. 


THE EPISTLES, 


221 


confirmation of their predilections. There are those 
who say that the great thing in Paul’s Epistles is 
their evidence of the resurrection of Jesus from the 
dead. And there is plenty of evidence that he be- 
lieved that Jesus died and rose again ; of the ascen- 
sion not a word ; the resurrection and ascension be- 
ing, apparently, with him identical. Fortunately for 
us, we have in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, 
(XV., 4-8) the grounds of Paul’s belief in this stupen- 
dous miracle set forth with perfect frankness. There, 
after detailing the various appearances of Jesus, 
after his resurrection, — to Cephas and the Twelve, to 
above five hundred at once, after that to J ames and all 
the Apostles, — he adds, “ And last of all he was seen 
of me also.” So then it appears that he puts his 
own vision of Jesus years after his death exactly on a 
level with his previous appearances, or rather that 
he puts the previous appearances exactly on a level 
with his own vision. This is Paul’s evidence to the 
resurrection. For him it was sufficient. Whether 
it shall be for you or me, depends upon our ideas of 
evidence. To me it seems that Paul’s witness to 
the resurrection is the ruin of the argument. For 
it remands all the phenomena of Christ’s appear- 
ances to his disciples after his death to that vision- 
ary sphere where, so that the subjective elements 
are present, there is no need of anything objective 
whatsoever to produce a vision of the most im- j 
pressive and sublime reality. 

But that which endears the Apostle Paul to me 
above, I had almost said, all other men in history, — 
that which, as I read his letters, for the thousandth 


222 


THE BIBLE OF TQ-DA Y. 


time, makes dim my eyes with hot and passionate 
tears, is his heroic struggle against fearful odds for 
simple righteousness of heart and life, as the one 
only power of God unto salvation. The Jersusalem 
Apostles were not altogether wrong in refusing him 
admittance to their number. His place was not 
among those arid formalists. I sometime wonder if 
he has rightfully been called a saint. He bore but 
slight resemblance to “ that perfect monster whom 
the world ne’er saw.” He had his faults. He 
was not all sweetness. Sometimes he was irascible 
and fierce enough. He said some dreadful things 
about the holy Apostles, almost or quite as bad as 
anything they ever said of him. I am so glad I 
wasn’t Peter, when he “ withstood him to the face.”’ 
That look which Jesus gave him could not have 
gone much nearer to his heart. No, it must be con- 
fessed that Paul was not a perfect saint. But he 
was a splendid hero, and he was every inch a man. 
Thank heaven that when Rome built up, little by 
little, from century to century, a spiritual formalism 
and despotism, such as Paul would have abhorred, she 
had the intuitive grace and decency to make Peter, 
her imaginary, instead of Paul, her real Apostle, 
the central figure of her stupendous ecclesiastical 
mythology. There could have been no -sadder irony 
than to call Pope Pius IX, or Pope Leo XIII, the 
successor of St. Paul. Rome did well to neglect him 
for well nigh a thousand years. She should have 
neglected him forever. Between her spirit and his 
there is no sympathy, but everlasting enmity and 
war. And which of them shall triumph in the end ? 


SEVENTH LECTURE. 

THE CATHOLIC EPISTLES : REVELATION : ACTS. 

In my last lecture I considered the fourteen Epis- 
tles commonly ascribed to Paul. There are seven 
other Epistles in the New Testament, known as the 
Catholic Epistles. We are to understand Catholic 
here in the sense of general. The designation was 
probably applied originally to the first Epistles of 
John and Peter, to distinguish them from Paul’s 
Epistles which were generally addressed to a par- 
ticular community. These two Epistles obtained 
recognition in the Church much earlier than the 
others which were afterward united with them, and 
the designation Catholic was given to the whole col- 
lection. Of the seven one is ascribed to James, 
two to Peter, three to John, and one to Jude or 
Judas. In the ancient Mss. these Epistles gener- 
ally precede those of Paul, but our English order is 
that of the Sinaitic Ms. 

“The General Epistle of James” is the first in 
the New Testament order of arrangement, and this 
will help us to remember that it is also first in order 
of time. The first question which it suggests is, 
Who wrote it ? or, more exactly, what James is in- 
tended in the first verse, “James, a servant of God.’* 
Not “James the Elder,” certainly, for he was be- 

223 


224 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


headed by King Agrippa, about 44, A. D. The 
only alternatives then are “ James the son of Alphe- 
us,” and “ James the Brother of the Lord.” Some 
critics have considered these identical. But they 
were not so regarded by the earliest ecclesiastical 
writers. It is Paul who speaks of “James the 
Brother of the Lord,” and the word translated, 
brother cannot be translated cousin or relative, as it 
must be to identify him with James the Son of Al- 

I pheus. Jesus appears to have had four brothers, 
James and Joses, (Joseph) Simon and Judas, none 
of them Apostles. Renan thinks they were his 
half-brothers only, children of Mary by a second 
husband; others have thought them Joseph’s chil- 
dren by a former wife. What is most probable is 
that they were all the children of Mary (Jesus is 
called the first-born son) and Joseph. James the 
Brother of the Lord being then distinct from James 
the Son of Alpheus, which of them is the nominal 
writer of this Epistle? Most probably the former. 
The latter would have vaunted his Apostleship. 
But was the nominal the real author? Did James, 
the brother of Jesus, write this Epistle? In the 
main it is certainly conceived in his spirit, so far as 
it is anti-Pauline. But it is not sufficiently Jewish 
to be his. It does not insist upon the Mosaic law 
and circumcision, and the distinctions of clean and 
unclean food. The law of liberty is warmly eulo- 
gized. Again, the literary character of the Epistle 
is opposed to James’s authorship. The Greek is 
too refined. The external evidence for James’s au- 
thorship is also very weak. It was with the great* 


THE CA THOLIC EPISTLES. 


225 


est difficulty that the Epistle secured a canonical 
position and authority. It was made canonical at 
Carthage, in 397, A. D., by an ecclesiastical tour de 
force , in opposition to the general opinion of the 
Churches. It is therefore probable that we have 
here another pseudonymous writing which appeared 
soon after the death of James, and not long before 
the destruction of Jerusalem; about 68, A. D. The 
name of James &as chosen to give additional au- 
thority to the writer’s various injunctions. Luther’s 
opinion of its general character is well known. He 
called it “ a right strawy Epistle.” But this was 
because it contradicted his favorite doctrine of just- 
ification by faith. The chances are that it is the 
best reproduction anywhere contained in the New 
Testament Epistles of the Christianity of Jesus, a 
moral not a theological system. The object of the 
letter was to correct certain abuses that were preva- 
lent among the Jewish Christians, such as invidious 
distinctions between the rich and poor, and ambi- 
tion for ecclesiastical preferment. The expectation 
of the second coming of Jesus is nowhere more con- 
spicuous. “ Stablish your hearts ; for the coming 
of the Lord draweth nigh. Behold the judge 
standeth before the door.” But the anti-Pauline 
drift of the Epistle is its most evident trait. 
“ What doth it profit, my brethren, if a man say he 
hath faith, and hath not works? Can faith save 
him ? ” From the common-sense point of view this 
writer makes an excellent appearance ; but it is cer- 
tain that he was not deep-natured enough to ap- 
preciate the spiritual significance of Paul’s religion. 


226 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


And so he arrogantly addresses him, “But wilt 
thou know, 0 vain man, that faith without works 
is dead ? ” Possibly Paul is not intended, but 
probably he is. That his doctrine is intended 
does not admit of any doubt. The early Church 
was not quite the happy family of the popular 
imagination. Divisions, hatreds, rivalries, were as 
common then as now, and quite as sharp and bitter. 

The next Epistle in the New Testament order, 
and, by a singular piece of good fortune, in the 
order of time also,* is the first Epistle of Peter. For 
though Baur would have it that the Epistle was not 
written until the latter part of Trajan’s reign, 
(ended 117, A. D.) and though the circumstances of 
that time agree with its contents, we must allow, 
with Davidson, that the indications are not pointed 
enough to decide upon so late a date. Davidson’s 
own date is between A. D., 75 and 80. This is on 
the supposition that the Epistle is not Peter’s. 
Those who consider it authentic, date it all the way 
along from 46 to 64, A. D., when Peter is supposed 
to have perished in the Neronian persecution. But 
to every such date the contents of the Epistle are 
opposed as well as to its Petrine authorship. It pur- 
ports to be written from Babylon. Here it is most 
likely we have the mystical name for Rome, itself 
an indication that the letter was written after the 
Apocalypse , and not by the Apostle. 

Apparently we have here one of the most inter- 
esting and conspicuous of that class of writings, 
which the Tubingen critics have called tendency 

* Of the Catholic Epistles, 


THE CA THQLIC EPISTLES. 


227 


writings, from their exhibition of a tendency or pur- 
pose to conciliate or modify in some way the an- 
tagonism of the Petrine (J ewish-Christian) party, 
and the Pauline universalisraA How lively this 
antagonism was in Paul’s life-time, we have seen 
already in Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Cor- 
inthians. After his death the antagonism did not 
cease. Rather the breach widened as the first cen- 
tury approached its end, and far along into the 
second. Even after the J ewish-Christian party had 
conceded to the Gentiles some of Paul’s demands, 
the Apostle himself and much of his doctrine were 
objects of the fiercest animadversion. In the Clem- 
intine Recognitions (second century Jewish Christian 
writings) Paul is represented as throwing James from 
the top of the temple steps. In the Homilies , an- 
other form of the same writings, Paul is thinly dis- 
guised under the name of Simon Magus, as the 
great enemy of Peter and the true Christianity. It 
Is impossible to deny that Paul is intended where 
Peter says to Simon, u If indeed our Jesus did ap- 
pear unto thee in a vision, and thou did’st recog- 
nize him, and he conversed with thee, it was be- 
cause thou didst resist him, and he was wroth with 
thee ; for this reason it was that he spake with thee 
by visions and dreams, or even by outward revela- 
tions, if such took place. But can anyone be made 
wise to be the teacher of another by a vision ? And 
if thou sayest that he can, then why did the Master 
abide with us for a whole year and converse with us 

*1 use this word, as do the New Testament critics generally, t-c 
indicate Paul’s doctrine that the Gentiles must not first become Jews 
in order to be Christians ; that the new religion was for all upon an 
equal footing. 


228 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


not sleeping, but awake? And how could he be 
seen of thee when thou holdest things contrary to 
his teachings? But if thou wert seen of him for 
one hour and having been taught of him, wert made 
an Apostle, then preach the things which he said.” 

There are not wanting various signs of the free- 
dom and sharpness with which the Pauline party 
retorted on these scornful innuendoes. But little by 
little there grew up in the Church a Catholic party, 
a party of persons indisposed to throw themselves 
violently upon either side of the great controversy, 
but rather disposed to obliterate or at least ob- 
scure all differences as much as possible, and to es- 
tablish an era of good feeling. The extremes of 
Jewish and Pauline Christianity were both rejected, 
(Ebionitism and Marcionism) and as a means by 
which to effect a middle course, and also as one re- 
sult of such a course, there grew up a literature, 
the object of which was to disguise, as much as pos- 
sible, the conflict which had raged, and to make 
over the Apostles Paul and Peter as much as possi 
ble, each into the other’s likeness. Of this litera- 
ture, the book of Acts is the most notable example. 
Very similar is the book of Luke . Matthew is by a 
Jewish Christian, but with a conciliatory disposition. 
The first Epistle of Peter represents Peter through- 
out as a thorough Paulinist. The letter is written 
to Paul’s Churches to confirm them in the teachings 
of St. Paul. It abounds in Paul’s ideas, formulas, 
expressions. Thought and language, both are 
Pauline. I need not tell you how impossible it is 
to harmonize such a Peter as this with the Peter of 


THE CA THOLIC EPISTLES. 22g 

Paul’s most characteristic Epistles. This Peter, in 
stead of being the antagonist of Paul, is his double 
and his copyist. Fancy the real Peter studying 
Paul s Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, and 
transferring their ideas and expressions to his own ! 
If Peter had written a letter it would at least have 
been spontaneous. But this is not. It borrows not 
only from Romans and Corinthians , but also from 
Ephesians and James. The external evidence of 
Peter’s authorship is ample, but counts for nothing 
against all these internal traits, so strikingly non- 
Petrine.* 

The second Epistle of Peter is of a much later 
date and much more clearly unauthentic. The first 
unmistakable proof of its existence is in the writings 
of Clement Alexandrinus late in the second century. 
Not one of the imaginary references to the Epistle 
of an earlier date than this will bear examination. 
But Clement did not ascribe it to Peter. Its author- 
ship continued doubtful through the third and fourth 
centuries and its Petrine origin was still “ denied 
by most,” says Jerome, when it was forcibly in- 
troduced into the canon at the council of Car- 
thage in 397 A. D. The internal evidence would 
however prove it unauthentic if the external were as 
strong as possible. We have here another copyist. 
The expressions of Jude are freely borrowed and 
Jude was written as late as 80 A. D. In his anxiety 
to pass himself off for Peter the writer overacts his 
part. The real Peter would have been at no such 

* Luther’s admiration of this Epistle is a capital testimony to its 
Pauline character. 


230 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


pains to establish his identity. And even if Peter 
might have written, “ our beloved brother Paul/* 
for even in our day such epithets as this are used 
with very little meaning, it is absolutely impossible 
that he should have spoken of the Epistles of Paul 
as “ Scriptures.” We have here, in fact, the earliest 
designation as “ Scriptures ” of any part of the New 
Testament and it is a proof that we are far along in- 
to the second century, nearer its close than its be- 
ginning. The pathetic passage, “ Where is the 
promise of his coming ? For since the fathers fell 
asleep all things continue as they were from the be- 
ginning of the creation,” is evidence of a period 
much later than the Apostolic age. Then the 
fathers had not fallen asleep and then doubts 
had not arisen. But, moreover, the second com- 
ing of Jesus is attenuated into a ‘ day of the 
Lord.” Again the doctrinal application of the word 
heresy is a second century trait. The style of the 
Epistle is so unlike that of the first that it could not 
have been written by the same author, whoever 
wrote the first. Its real author we can never hope 
to know, nor the exact date of its appearance. 
Davidson suggests about 170 A. D., and he is a con- 
servative critic. The object of the Epistle is not 
clearly defined and its destination is differently re- 
presented in different parts. Apparently the letter 
was written to combat certain Gnostic speculations 
of the second century. It was written from an ad- 
vanced Jewish-Christian standpoint, so far advanced 
that the theology is largely Pauline. It has no such 
decided tendency as the first Epistle. Unconsciously 


THE CA THOLIC EPISTLES. 


231 


it celebrates the compromise between Jewish Chris* 
tianity and Pauline Universalism as already fairly 
accomplished. Less fettered by his u dead men’s 
clothes,” the author would have written much more 
effectively. The endeavor to keep up his character 
gives an indeterminate aspect or blur to almost 
everything he says. 

Following the two Epistles commonly ascribed to 
Peter, we have three which are as commonly ascribed 
to John. But whereas those ascribed to Peter are so 
ascribed in strict accordance with the contents of 
the Epistles, the three of John make no such inner 
claim to be the work of the Apostle. The first is 
purely impersonal ; the second and third begin “ The 
Elder unto the Elect lady ” and “ The Elder unto 
the well-beloved Gaius,” So that if we cannot ad- 
mit the Johannine authorship of these Epistles they 
are simple anonymous writings, like the Epistle to 
the Hebrews ; not pseudonymous, like those of Peter, 
the pastorals to Timothy and Titus, Ephesians, and 
second Thessalonians. The traditional opinion con- 
cerning the first of these Epistles is that it was 
written together with the fourth Gospel and the 
Apocalypse by the Apostle John. The variations 
from this opinion are numerous and important. The 
majority of — I might say all — the real critics are 
agreed that the same person, John or anybody else, 
did not write both the fourth Gospel and the Apo- 
calypse. If John wrote the Apocalypse and not the 
fourth Gospel, all of these would say, he certainly 
did not write the first Epistle of John, for this goes 
with the Gospel not with the Apocalypse, if it goes 


232 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


with either. And as the more common opinion 
among real critics is that John did write the Apo- 
calypse, the more common opinion is that he did not 
write the first Epistle. But there are those who think 
that John did not write the Apocalypse but did 
write the fourth Gospel. And these almost uni- 
versally ascribe to him the first Epistle. And again 
there are those who think he wrote neither Apo- 
calypse nor Gospel nor Epistle. But whoever wrote 
the Gospel and Epistle, it is commonly agreed that 
they were both written by the same person. To 
this, however, Davidson does not assent. Allow- 
ing that there are remarkable resemblances between 
the Gospel and Epistle, he finds that there are 
also differences which in his opinion are suffi- 
cient to establish a double authorship. But while 
F. C. Baur finds in the Epistle only weak imita- 
tion of the Gospel, Davidson finds in it brilliant 
anticipations of the fourth Gospel proceeding from 
an independent mind. Neither opinion seems to 
me entirely sound. That there is here anticipation 
of the fourth Gospel rather than imitation I am con- 
vinced, but also that it is the anticipation of the 
same mind whose striking individuality is impressed 
upon the later work. Assured that the fourth Gos- 
ple is not the work of John, the Epistle also must 
give up all claim to be considered his. The date of 
its appearance, somewhat prior to that of the fourth 
Gospel, may be approximately fixed at 130 A. D. 

But, if not John, who was the author? It is easy 
enough to ask such a question, but it is very diffi- 
cult to answer it. The most that we can say is* 


THE CA THOLIC EPISTLES. 


233 


that it probably originated in Asia Minor, among 
the Ephesians, to whom the name and fame of the 
Apostle John were specially dear.* Without nam- 
ing itself as his, it is evidently intended to pass 
for his. Possibly John, the Presbyter (Renan says 
probably), resorted to this impersonation, and to 
the still more daring one of the fourth Gospel, in 
order to advance the reputation of the Apostle who 
had honored Ephesus by making it the centre of 
his missionary operations, and at the same time to 
get a better hearing for some speculations of his 
own. This John the Presbyter was a considerable 
person in and about Ephesus, in the forepart of the 
second century. He was reputed to have an un- 
common store of traditional knowledge of Christian 
origins. The probability that the first Epistle of 
John and the fourth Gospel were both written by 
this Presbyter John is much increased by the fact 
that the second and third Epistles of John are writ- 
ten avowedly by a presbyter, translated “ Elder” in 
the first verse of each, and the style and thought 
and doctrine of these Epistles is as nearly as may 
be identical with that of the first Epistle and the 
Gospel. Proceeding, therefore, as we should al- 
ways, from the known to the unknown, we are 
compelled to assign the Gospel and the three Epis- 
tles to a certain presbyter, and both the name and 
fame f of the Presbyter John, of Ephesus, make it 

* From arbitrary choice, says Keim, without his ever having been 
among them. 

f Except that Papias and Irenseus represent him as a Millenarian, 
an argument for his authorship of the Apocalypse. 


234 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


seem highly probable that he was the principal 
author of this important group of writings. 

The first Epistle is a sort of essay preliminary to 
the fourth Gospel.* Perhaps the success of this 
brochure induced the author to attempt a bolder 
flight. His polemical purpose, so far as he had 
one, was to attack the Docetists, a thriving sect in 
Asia Minor, who contended that the human Jesus 
was a mere phantom, which only seemed to suffer 
on the cross. These are the “ Antichrists” of the 
second chapter ; but along with this purpose, there 
is a charming mysticism, evincing itself in many 
striking phrases, which have served the purposes 
of the higher Christian sentiment better, perhaps, 
than any others in the New Testament. The begin- 
ning and the end of everything is love. The most 
remarkable interpolation in the New Testament oc- 
curs in this Epistle. The words in the seventh and 
eighth verses of the fifth chapter, “ in heaven, the 
Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost, and these 
three are one, and there are three that bear witness 
on earth,” are only found in four out of two hun- 
dred and fifty Mss. of the Epistles, and these four 
date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 
“ Why, don’t you know that that is spurious ? ” 
said a Unitarian to a Trinitarian, who quoted it at 
him. “ O, yes,” said the Trinitarian, “ I knew it. 
But I thought perhaps you didn’t.” 

The second and third Epistles of John are not, 
as we have seen, professedly the Apostle’s. They 
are professedly a certain elder’s, and probably the 

* Renan’s opinion, Contemporary Review , September, 1877. 


THE CA THOLIC EPISTLES . 


235 


elder, or presbyter, John’s. They contain only a 
short chapter each. “ The Elect lady,” to whom 
the second Epistle is addressed, is probably no in- 
dividual lady, but some church of Asia Minor; and 
the Gaius, to whom the third is addressed, is possi- 
bly equivalent to our modern “ Mr. So-and-So.” Both 
Epistles, in the judgment of Renan, are mere mod- 
els of Encyclical Epistles. But there are features 
which but ill agree with this interpretation. Oppo- 
sition to the Docetists appears again in the second. 
The fact of their preservation is sufficient to attest 
their early reputation. Only the supposed author- 
ship of an Apostle could have preserved such tiny 
craft when whole armadas went to wreck. Their 
principal interest for us is as a key to t he most en- 
grossing literary problem of the New Testament: 
the authorship of the fourth Gospel. Certainly by 
the same hand as the first Epistle and the Gospel, 
they make no pretensions to Apostolic authorship, 
but are avowedly the work of some “ Presbyter.” 
The time of their appearance must have been very 
near that of the first Epistle, a little earlier or later. 

The last of the seven catholic Epistles is The 
General Epistle of Jude. The writer announces 
himself in the first verse as “Jude, the servant of 
Jesus Christ, and brother of James.” Among the 
twelve Apostles there was another Jude, or Judas, 
besides Iscariot, and in our common version he is 
spoken of as the “ brother of James,” but the word 
brother is not in the Greek original, and is probably 
not the word to be supplied. Moreover, the Jude 
of the Epistle was not an Apostle. If he were, 


236 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


would he seek to identify himself by calling him- 
self the brother of James? Would not “ Jude, an 
Apostle," be a more natural and honorable dis- 
tinction ? But in the eighteenth verse he distin- 
guishes himself from the Apostles by speaking of 
them in the third person. The James, whose 
brother he was, was evidently “ James, the brother 
of the Lord." If, then, the Epistle is authentic, 
it is very interesting, as proceeding from the brother 
of Jesus. Nor does there seem to be any sufficient 
reason for doubting its authenticity. It is certainly 
no reason that it quotes the book of Enoch , an apo- 
cryphal book, which only the Ethiopic canon has 
preserved. The influence of this book is very ap- 
parent elsewhere in the New Testament. The dis- 
tinction between apocryphal and canonical was 
not then clearly defined. Enoch was on the way 
to canonicity, and would have attained to it but 
for the destruction of Jerusalem. But, evidently, 
to be the brother of Jesus did not insure critical 
judgment. The prophecy of Enoch , written in the 
previous century, is spoken of as written by “ Enoch, 
the seventh from Adam," and we have a charmingly 
ingenuous reference to Michael, the Archangel, who, 
“when contending with the devil, he disputed about 
the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him 
a railing accusation, but said, the Lord rebuke thee." 
The Epistle, which contains but one chapter, is a 
vigorous piece of writing, directed against certain 
evil-doers in some particular church, a miserable set 
of antinomians, given over to licentious and other 
hateful practices, very similar to those condemned 


THE APOCALYPSE. 


237 


by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. When 
it was written, the Apostles had vanished from the 
scene (verse 17), so that we must suppose Jude him- 
self an old man. Davidson assigns the Epistle to 
the year 80, A. D., but certainty on this point is not 
attainable. 

Of the seven catholic Epistles then, we find that 
only one was written by the traditional author. 
But only those of Peter and James are really unau- 
thentic and pseudonymous ; the three of John not 
claiming to be his,* especially the second and the 
third, which are avowedly not his. 

The next book which invites our attention is the 
Apocalypse , called in our common version The Rev- 
elation of St. John the Divine. There is no other 
book in the New Testament about which so much 
has been written to so little purpose. Dr. South 
said of it, “ It either finds a man mad, or makes 
him so.” It was said of Calvin that he showed his 
wisdom in not writing a commentary on this, as he 
did on other books. For almost every century it 
has had a different meaning. Judaism, Paganism, 
Mohammedanism, the Papacy, the French Revolu- 
tion, the cholera, the potato-rot — all these things 
have been found in it, and hundreds more. Very 
likely at this momentf some one is discovering the 
most remarkable prophecies in it of the Turko-Rus- 
sian and the threatened Anglo-Russian war, and 
will make out quite as good a case as any of his 
predecessors. No wonder the Scotch elder, on 
learning that his minister proposed to give a course 

* The first suggests his authorship, without directly claiming it. 

f April 7, 1878. 


238 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

of lectures on the Apocalypse, cautioned him, say- 
ing, “ I’ve*nae objection to ye takin’ a quiet trot 
through the seven churches, but for ony sake drive 
canny among the seals .and trumpets.” The cause 
of so many fanciful and such widely different inter- 
pretations is not far to seek. It is nothing else than 
the persuasion that because the Apocalypse is bound 
up with the Bible, its predictions must at one time 
or another certainly come true. No generation has 
so far been able to discover any past fulfillment 
of these predictions, and hence it has been in 
ferred that the fulfillment is still future. But amid 
much that is doubtful concerning the Apocalypse , one 
thing is plain as plain can be, namely, that its predic- 
tions related to an immediate future. In the pro- 
logue we read, “ Blessed is he that readeth, and they 
that hear the words of this prophecy ; for the time 
is at hand “ The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which 
God gave unto him to show unto his servants the 
things which must shortly come to pass .” And in the 
epilogue we read, “ He which testifieth these things 
saith, surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so come 
Lord Jesus.” Do not these phrases make it as clear 
as day that we are to seek for the fulfillment of the 
writer’s prophecies in the time immediately suc- 
ceeding their appearance ; that, whether we dis- 
cover their fulfillment there or not, it is absurd to 
look for it anywhere else ? But if we do not find 
it there, then we must allow that the prophet was 
mistaken in his expectations. Certainly: and why 
not? This is exactly what the analogy of Old 
Testament prophecy would lead us to expect. The 


THE APOCALYPSE. 


239 

Old Testament prophets were almost invariably 
mistaken in their expectations.* And, especially 
the analogy of prophets similar to the Apocalyptist 
would lead us to anticipate the fallaciousness of all 
his hopes, for this book is one of a class, of which 
other notable examples are the book of Daniel , por- 
tions of Ezekiel and Zechariah, the second book of 
Esdras in the Apocrypha, and the book of Enoch. f 
To the book of Enoch it bears a most remarkable 
resemblance, so much so that John as well as Jude, 
must have been well acquainted with that remark- 
able production. All of these writings are char- 
acterized by greater boldness than the mass of Old 
Testament prophecy. They set forth the events of 
the future in a series of extravagant and enigmatic 
visions. So long as their prophecies are post even- 
turn , only their ignorance of history prevents the 
most remarkable fulfillments. The moment they 
would penetrate the future their predictions fail of 
literal or even general verification. The analogy 
of other New Testament writers would also lead us 
to expect the disappointment of the Apocalyptist. 
For Paul and James and Jude, in their Epistles, all 
cherish a lively expectation of the second coming 
of Jesus, and the collapse of the existing order of 
the world. Granting that John the Apostle wrote 
the A pocalypse, was he any less likely to be mistaken 
than Paul and Jude? But the moment that we 
grant the possibility of his being mistaken, the 
Apocalypse becomes easily comprehensible, not in 

* Kuenen’s Prophets and Prophecy in Israel. 

f See the fifth lecture. 


240 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


each minute particular, but in its general intention. 
For a century and more there has been a growing 
disposition to allow that the Apocalyptist was not 
infallible, and as a consequence there has been a 
growing agreement among scholars in regard to the 
intention of the work. There is hardly any point 
of Biblical criticism on which there is more general 
agreement at the present time. 

This agreement is less perfect in regard to the 
authorship of the book than in regard to the nature 
of its contents and the time of its appearance, but 
even upon this head the most advanced critics agree 
with the most conservative in accepting the tradi- 
tional opinion that it was written by the Apostle 
John. Still it is not to be denied that some of the 
most able critics, midway between the apologists 
and the Tubingen critics, deny the Apostolic au- 
thorship and ascribe the book. to John the Presby- 
ter, or some wholly unknown author. U nfortunately 
the question of authorship is seriously complicated 
with the most vital question in New Testament criti- 
cism : the authorship of the fourth Gospel. Critics 
who allow its Johannine authorship are accused by 
others of doing this in order to weaken the case of 
the fourth Gospel, it being generally agreed that both 
cannot be by the same author. But are not those 
who deny the Johannine authorship unconsciously 
influenced by their desire to save the fourth Gospel 
for the Apostle? A bias upon this side is quite as 
natural as on the other. Among the more distin- 
guished of the critics on this side are Noyes and 
Bleek and Dusterdieck and Ewald and De Wette. 


THE APOCAL YPSE 


241 


Among the more distinguished on the John-side are 
Baur and Hilgenfeld and Zeller and Davidson and 
Martineau and Tayler. 

The traditional evidence of the early Church 
in favor of the Apostle’s authorship is certainly as 
strong as that for the most indubitable of Paul’s 
Epistles. After the lapse of two or three centuries 
doubts were thrown upon its authorship but these 
apparently were suggested solely by its doctrinal 
contents. Millenarianism fell into disrepute, and 
so it was insisted that the Apostle could not have 
written such a Millenarian book. It is, however, 
a notable fact that both Clement and Origen, to 
whom its Millenarianism was exceedingly distasteful 
felt themselves obliged to credit it to the Apostle. 
Yet, strong as is the external evidence in favor of 
John, I should not hesitate to deny his authorship 
if the internal evidence were decidedly opposed to 
it. But the internal evidence is eminently con- 
firmatory of the external. Four times the author 
names himself as John. That he does not name 
himself as an apostle is perfectly natural. A writer 
simulating him would have been sure to do it. But 
he writes to the seven churches with all the dignity 
and authority of an apostle. From any John but 
the apostle such an imperious tone would have been 
ridiculous. The central idea of the Apocalypse, 
the second coming of Jesus , is in perfect consonance 
with the Apostolic age and character. It appears in 
the Gospels, in Paul’s Epistles, in Hebrews , James 
and Jude , in first and second Peter. The idea of 
Antichrist (the name does not appear) is the natural 


242 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


concrete beginning of the more abstract conceptions 
of a later time. (n. Thess. : 1st Epistle of John.) 
Those who have failed to find the individuality of 
John in the Apocalypse base their idea of his indi- 
viduality entirely upon the fourth Gospel. Aside 
from this the Apocalypse is in singular harmony 
with what we know of the Apostle. He appears in 
the Synoptic Gospels as a “ son of thunder,” impet- 
uous and fierce, wishing to call down fire from 
heaven on a Samaritan village. He appears in 
Paul’s Epistles, and even in the mediating Acts of 
the Apostles, as a narrow, Judaizing, conservative 
opponent of the Apostle to the Gentiles. And in 
the Apocalypse he is thoroughly Jewish. The El- 
ders, or elect, sit upon thrones immediately adjacent 
to Yahweh’s and participate in his judicial functions. 
These are all Jews. The Gentiles have “ back seats ” 
assigned to them. They become quasi Jews. In 
the catastrophe which he foretells, the temple is 
miraculously preserved and Jerusalem is the capital 
of the Messianic Kingdom. The hostility to Paul- 
ine universalism is exactly what we should expect 
from John, forming our conception of him upon 
Paul’s Epistles. One must be wilfully blind not to 
perceive that Paul and his followers are designated 
when we read of “ those who say they are Apostles 
and are not, but are liafs,” and of those of “ the syna- 
gogue of Satan who say they are Jews, but are not,” 
and of “ the doctrine of Balaam,” that it is lawful 
to eat things offered to idols. Paul claims to have 
knowledge of “ the deep things of God.” “ The 
deep things of Satan” rather, retorts the Apocalypse 


THE APOCALYPSE. 


243 

Was it by any accident that the names of only 
twelve Apostles were in the foundations of the New 
Jerusalem? Is it not much more likely from the 
general tone of the Apocalypse that Paul was pur- 
posely excluded ? There is no other feature of the 
Apocalypse which differentiates it from the fourth Gos- 
pel so much as this : the Apocalyptist is one of the 
narrowest of Jewish Christians: the fourth Evangel- 
ist is one of the narrowest of anti-Jewish Christians. 
Can we suppose that such a change as this came over 
the Apostle after he had reached and passed the 
grand climacteric? Such a supposition is only less as- 
tounding than the supposition of Dr.E. H. Sears* that 
both the Gospel and the Apocalypse were written 
by the Apostle when he was almost a centennarian. 
“ Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? ” 
It is certainly wonderful enough that a Galilean 
fisherman at any time of life should write the Apoc- 
alypse . But so far as its Greek is concerned he 
might have written it more easily than any other 
New Testament book, for it is ruggeder and more 
Hebraistic than that of any other. 

At least we are more certain of the Johannine 
authorship of the Apocalypse than of the author- 
ship of any other New Testament book, except the 
four indubitable Epistles of St. Paul. Here then we 
have the only book in the New Testament written 
by an immediate follower of Jesus. A Gospel from 
his hand would have been much more welcome, but 
we must make the best of what we have. Suppos- 

* In his fascinating and brilliant critical romance, The Fourth 
Gospel the Heart of Chiist. 


244 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


ing John to be the author, when and where did he 
write it ? The traditional answer is in 95 or 96 A. D. 
at Patmos. The critical answer does not agree with 
this. Jerusalem had not yet fallen. Therefore it 
was written before 70 A. D., and from Chapter XVII., 
10, 11, we infer in the reign of Galba or Vespasian, 
in the year 68 or 69. “ And there are seven kings,” 

we read ; “ five are fallen, and one is and the other 
is not yet come, and when he cometh he must con- 
tinue a short space ; aud the beast that was and is 
not even he is the eighth and is of the seven, and 
goeth into perdition.” The five fallen kings plainly 
enough are Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, 
Nero. The one that is reigning is more doubtful. 
Galba, Otho and Vitellius reigned so short a time, 
and were so partially acknowledged throughout the 
Empire, that possibly they were passed over. In 
this case Vespasian is the sixth, and, as his likeliest 
successor, Titus is “ the other ” who is not yet come. 
“When he comes he must continue a short space,” 
because “ the beast that was and is not ” is to return 
and rule the Empire in his place. Who is this 
“beast that was and is not”? Nero beyond a 
doubt. For there is abundant evidence of a wide- 
spread belief after the death of Nero that he was 
not really dead, but somewhere concealed, and that 
he would come back again to seize the sceptre. For 
this belief we have the evidence of the four great 
historians, Suetonius and Tacitus and Dio Chrysos- 
tom and Dio Cassius, besides a great abundance in 
the Sibylline oracles and the Church Fathers. Then 
too we have the “ number of the beast.” How then 


THE APOCALYPSE . 


245 


can we desire more perfect indications of the date 
of the Apocalypse? At the widest range it is some- 
where between the death of Nero and the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem, in the year 68 or 69 A. D. The 
latter date is the more probable. The place of 
writing was probably Ephesus, in Asia Minor.* 

The analogy of Hebrew prophecy, and especially 
of the Apocalyptic writings, Daniel and Enoch , is 
our best guide in seeking to discover the object 
which the author of this composition had in view. 
That analogy would lead us to expect his object to 
be two-fold ; part warning, part encouragement. 
To warn or to encourage, the old Hebrew prophets 
had endeavored to withdraw the veil which hid the 
future from the eyes of common men. Not to as- 
tonish by their prescience, much less to gratify an 
idle curiosity, did their prophetic souls divine the 
course of individual or national futurity. Without 
exception their predictions were means to an end. 
The end which the Apocalyptist had in view was to 
encourage his fellow-Christians under the stress of 
persecution, and to warn them of the danger of 
apostatizing from the faith they had professed. 
The prophetic visions which he unrolled before them 
were means directed to this end. The one great 
central idea in all these visions was that Christ was 
coming back to live and reign upon the earth. He 
was not only coming, but he was coming right away. 
“ He which testifieth these things saith, surely 1 
come quickly .” He was coming to raise the dead ; 

* Keim denying the Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse , 
naturally denies any connection between John and Asia Minor. 


246 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


to judge the world ; to establish his Messianic King- 
dom ; to purify Jerusalem ; to shatter the enormous 
power of Rome ; to cast the Antichrist and Satan 
I into Hell. Why then should Christian men despair? 
Why should they not endure with patience to the 
end? Never I think was any writing better suited 
to the purpose of its author than this same Apoca- 
lypse. It might well lift up the hands that hung 
down and confirm the feeble knees. John had no 
doubt that the things he predicted would certainly 
come to pass. He was no psychologist. These 
splendors of his imagination appealed to him as a 
direct and awful revelation from the Most High 
God. The things which he predicted did not come 
to pass. Jerusalem, temple and all, was trampled 
in the dust. Nero did not come back. Christ did 
not come back. The Babylon of his denunciation 
; became the New Jerusalem, the Christian capital. 
But the predictions and others like them, — for this 
Apocalypse was only one of many which appeared 
about this time, — the predictions did their work. 
They sustained men's fainting hearts. For a whole 
century men went on hoping and believing, ere they 
began to ask, “ Where is the promise of his coming? 
For since the fathers fell asleep all things remain as 
( they were from the beginning of the creation.” 

The contents of the Apocalypse may be divided 
into three parts. Part first, consisting of the first 
three chapters, is made up of a series of rebukes 
and warnings and encouragements dictated by Jesus 
Christ to the seven churches of Asia Minor. Part 
second, Chapters IV. — XI., sets forth the woes that 


THE APOCALYPSE. 


24 7 


are to precede the second coming of Christ, culmi- 
nating in those which purify the Jewish nation. 
This part includes the opening of the seven seals. 
Of the plagues indicated by the four horses which 
appeared at the opening of the first four seals, the 
second, third and fourth are plainly war and famine 
and pestilence. But the first horse suggests no nat- 
ural explanation.* At the opening of the seventh 
seal there is an awful silence of expectation. Seven 
angels appear with seven trumpets, and as each 
blows a blast the vision of a woe appears, prelimi- 
nary to the final conquest of Messiah. At the 
sounding of the sixth trumpet Jerusalem is purified 
and the temple is preserved to be the regal seat of 
the returning Christ. The seventh trumpet is re- 
served to sound the final woe to which all that pre- 
cedes leads up by gradual approaches : the over- 
whelming destruction of Babylon, by which is 
symbolized the power of Rome and heathendom. 
The third part of the book is the revelation attend- 
ant on the sounding of the seventh trumpet. This 
part begins at the twelfth chapter and continues to 
the end. First we have a description of the terrible 
Satanic dragon which is the archetype in heaven of 
the Roman power, then a figurative description of the 
Roman power itself, the beast with seven heads and 
ten horns; then the judgment upon Rome, the 
seven vials of wrath poured out, Rome and Satan 
cast into the lake that burneth with fire and brim- 
stone, the reign of Christ upon the earth a thousand 
years, the loosing of Satan, his final overthrow, the 
* It suggests the victorious Christ to Bleek and Dr. Noyes. 


248 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY. 


second resurrection, the Day of Judgment, the 
coming down from heaven of the New Jerusalem. 
The Epilogue contains a fearful curse on anybody 
who should add anything to the book or take any- 
thing from it, a capital testimony to the rage foi 
literary mutilation and addition which was so char-, 
acteristic of the time. While it cannot be denied 
that the Apocalypse contains many isolated passages 
of great imaginative force and beauty, it must be 
confessed that nothing could be clumsier than its 
general arrangement. The apologist may find in 
this a proof of the rhapsodical condition of the 
writer. But the literary critic will find only another 
evidence of the truth of Professor Smith’s assertion : 
“The Hebrew genius did not at all lie in the direc- 
tion of organic structure.” We have here no rhap- 
sody, but the result of long and painful cogitation 
by a man whose constructive imagination utterly 
refused to second his religious zeal. Hence this 
bewildering muddle of seals and trumpets and vials 
and plagues, shot- through from time to time with 
lightning flashes of the true Promethean fire. 

Nothing is surer than that this book was written 
for an immediate purpose. Its predictions were 
concerned with the immediate future and, whether 
they were then fulfilled or not, it is absurd to seek 
for any realization of them in the general course of 
subsequent events and in particular catastrophes of 
later times. 

The fortunes of the Apocalypse have been very 
interesting and significant. After the conversion of 
the Roman Empire the obvious meaning of the 


ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. 


249 


Woman and the Beast was frittered away as being 
too uncomplimentary to the new Christian capital 
As the end of the first Christian millenium approach- 
ed, there was universal and immense excitement 
throughout Christendom, in expectation of the loos- 
ing of the devil and the general resurrection, but, noth- 
ing happening, the interpretation of the Apocalypse 
became more and more symbolical arid fanciful. 
The beast was found to mean Mohammedanism and 
the false prophet Mohammed. Again the papal 
party found in the beast the Hohenstaufens and 
these returned the compliment. The Protestants 
found the Roman Church prefigured in the Woman 
and the Beast. Later enthusiasts have found \ 
the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. i 
The number of the beast, 666, which is clearly the 
numerical complement of Ccesar Nero or the Latins, as 
we interpret it by Hebrew or Greek numeral letters, 
has probably been interpreted in a thousand differ- 
ent ways. But we have come at length to pretty 
near the end of these vagaries. 

The Acts of the Apostles is one of the .most inter- 
esting books of the New Testament, and were it 
what its name implies, a history of the apostles gen- 
erally, it would have a quite incalculable value. But 
the title is misleading. The Sinaitic Ms. more 
properly has simply “Acts,” and the Vatican Ms., 

“ Acts of Apostles,” for the acts reported are really 
only those of two apostles, Peter and Paul. The 
other apostles are only mentioned incidentally. 
The book falls naturally into two parts. In the first 
part, to the end of the twelfth chapter, Peter is the 


250 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


important person ; in the second part, from the 
thirteenth chapter to the end, Paul is exclusively 
important. Renan has called the book, “ The 
Christian Odyssey,” and certainly it has an air of 
conquest and adventure which attracts us to it with an 
irresistible charm. We may accept in full the charges 
which the Tubingen critics make on its veracity and 
still return to it with unabated interest. It may not 
be history and biography, but it is at least one of 
the most charming fictions that was ever written. 

The contents of the first part are, in brief : an 
( account of the ascension of Jesus, the return of the 
apostles to Jerusalem, the outpouring of the spirit 
on the day of Pentecost ; the first persecution of the 
infant church ; the death of Annanias and Sapphira; 

, the election of seven deacons, one of whom, Ste- 
phen, is stoned to death, by order of the Jewish 
council ; a new and violent persecution of the church ; 
the dispersion of the disciples and consequent 
preaching of the gospel in Samaria, where Peter en- 
counters Simon Magus ; the conversion of Paul on 
his way to Damascus ; Peter’s journey to Lydda, 
and the miracles attending it ; the first preaching of 
the Gospel to the Gentiles by Peter, with the con- 
version and baptism of Cornelius ; the ministry of 
Paul and Barnabas at Antioch. 

The contents of part second are as follows : the 
return of Paul and Barnabas to Antioch, followed by 
their first missionary journey ; after preaching in 
Cyprus, and Perga, and Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, 
Lystra and Derbe, they retraced their steps to An- 
tioch, where a dispute arose about the obligation of 


ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 


2 5 I 


Gentile converts to practice circumcision and the 
law of Moses. To settle the matter Paul, Barnabas, 
and others are sent to Jerusalem, where a council is 
held and it is decided, after speeches by James and 
Peter, that only Jewish Christians shall observe the 
law, including circumcision : Gentiles shall be ab- 
solved with certain exceptions — abstinence from 
food offered to idols being the most notable. Then 
follows Paul's second missionary journey, in com- 
pany with Silas. It takes him to Syria, Cilicia, and 
Lycaonia, where he circumcises Timothy, to Phrygia 
and Galatia, and from Mysia to Troas ; thence to 
Macedonia in obedience to a vision ; from Philippi to 
Thessalonica and Berea; Paul’s next appearance is 
alone at Athens, where he speaks on the Acropolis; 
then at Corinth, where he stays a year and a half ; 
then back to Antioch by way of Caesarea and Jeru- 
salem, touching at Ephesus upon his voyage. After 
a time he sets out on his third missionary journey, 
during which he “went over all the country of Gala- 
tia and Phrygia in order strengthening all the dis- 
ciples." After a stay of some three years in Ephesus, 
he sets out for Jerusalem by the round-about way of 
Macedonia and Achaia. Arriving at Jerusalem he 
is persuaded by the other apostles to prove his devo- 
tion to Judaism by joining himself with four men 
who had undertaken a vow, getting his head shaved 
with them and paying all the charges. He consents 
but is seized upon by the Jews in the temple, 
dragged out and beaten. Claiming to be a Roman 
citizen he is rescued by the Roman officer. Sent to 
the Sanhedrim, he claims to be a Pharisee, and so 


252 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


makes the Pharisees his partizans. To prevent an- 
other attack of the mob upon him, he is sent to 
Caesarea where he speaks before Felix and Drusilla 
with great power, but remains a prisoner for two 
years, and then, Felix being superseded by Festus, 
he appeals before him to Caesar, and is finally sent 
to Rome ; but not before he has made a great im- 
pression upon King Agrippa. The voyage to Rome 
is treated expansively and his arrival there is made 
to appear the first introduction of Christianity to 
the Eternal City. “ And Paul dwelt two years in 
his own hired house, and received all that came to 
him.” 

Have we in this book of Acts a trustworthy ac- 
count of actual events, of Peter and Paul, their 
characters and mutual relations, and of the manner 
in which Christianity from being a little Jewish sect 
became a world religion ? With some abatements 
we might think so if we only had this book for our 
instruction. But fortunately for us, and fortunately 
for Paul, though unfortunately for Peter and for the 
credibility of this book, we have also certain letters 
of Paul between which and this book we are obliged 
to judge, and doing so, we come to the conclusion 
that this book is a theological romance, written with 
a set purpose to represent important matters in a 
different light from that of more trustworthy authori- 
ties. 

It is universally agreed that this book was written 
by the same person as the third Gospel ; both of 
them by Luke according to traditional opinion. But 
where Luke puts the ascension of the risen Jesus on 


ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. 


253 


the day of the resurrection, Acts puts it forty days 
after. That says at Bethany ; this from the Mount 
of Olives. A writer who thus contradicts himself 
we should expect to contradict others, and we are 
not disappointed. The book abounds in the most 
startling miracles, of such a character that they excite 
at once our incredulity. The Gospel miracles are 
very few and simple in comparison. But we will let 
them go, save as they contradict themselves or 
something more reliable. I can only name a few 
out of the many contradictions between the Acts 
and Paul’s Epistles. In the Acts soon after his con- 
version Paul goes up to Jerusalem and begins to 
preach Christianity. In Galatians he tells us he did 
not go to Jerusalem for three years, but went into 
Arabia. In the fifteenth chapter of Acts, we have 
an account of a council in Jerusalem, Paul and Bar- 
nabas having been sent from Antioch to inquire about 
the obligations of Gentile Christians to observe the 
Jewish law. We have here an entire misrepresenta- 
tion of a visit to Jerusalem described by Paul in the 
second chapter of Galatians . In Acts we have a for- 
mal, in Galatians an informal conference. In Acts the 
law is declared binding upon Jewish Christians, and 
Paul assents, which he could not possibly have done ; 
he who declared, “ If ye be circumcised Christ shall 
profit you nothing.” In Acts it is decreed that even 
Gentiles must abstain from meats offered to idols, 
and Paul publishes far and wide this decree, exactly 
contrary to his own convictions expressed in his 
Corinthian Epistles. Both sides are represented as 
making concessions. Paul asserts that he made no 


254 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


concession. The apostles would have had him cir 
cumcise Titus and he stubbornly refused. Of this 
; the Acts says nothing, but at a later date it repre- 
! sents him as circumcising Timothy. To believe 
this is to believe that he went backward. The Acts 
mentions a visit of Paul between this and the first. 
Paul implies distinctly that he made no such visit. 

( What the gift of tongues was we know from Paul’s 
Epistle to the Corinthians. It was the gift of talk- 
ing unintelligible gibberish. But in the Acts this 
gift becomes, the miraculous power of speaking for- 
eign languages, evidently a symbol of the Pauline 
Universalism, and further suggested by the Rabbin- 
ical notion that in the Messianic times the confusion 
of tongues begun at Babel would be resolved back 
again into a universal language. The account of 
Paul’s arrival at Rome in Acts is wholly at variance 
) with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Here a flourish- 
ing church is represented as existing ; there Christ- 
t, ianity as being unknown except by mere hearsay. 
Among the internal contradictions it is notable that 
Paul’s companions on the way to Damascus, are 
represented both as hearing and as not hearing the 
.voice of Jesus. Annas, the high priest, is represented 
as a Sadducee, (v. 17) which we know that he was not. 
This misrepresentation is not without a definite pur- 
pose. The account of Simon Magus is full of doubt- 
ful particulars. It is even doubtful whether there 
ever was any such person. In the second century 
he was identified with Paul. In short the narratives 
in Acts will seldom bear examination. They every- 
where abound in mutual contradictions and internal 
incongruities. 


ACTS OF THE APOSTLES . 


255 


This book is very rich in speeches. There are 
several of Peter’s, a remarkable one of Stephen’s, 
and several of Paul’s, of which those before Felix 
and Agrippa, and the one in Athens upon Mars 
Hill, will occur to you most readily. These speeches 
cannot be regarded as historical. They could not 
have* been made by the persons to whom they are 
ascribed. They are too short for actual addresses 
on the occasions indicated. Paul preached so long 
at Troas that Eutychus went to sleep, and fell out 
of a three story window. But he would hardly 
have got Napoleon’s forty winks before any one of 
these was over. But the principal reason for refus- 
ing credence to these speeches is that they are all 
alike. Peter and Stephen and Paul, all speak the 
same thoughts, in the same language. Listening 
to Peter, Paul seems to be ventriloquizing. Peter 
was a Jewish Christian, and he talks Pauline Uni- 
versalism. Paul’s speeches have in no single in- 
stance the ring of his Epistles. The Greek and 
Roman historians put made-up speeches of their 
own into the mouths of generals and emperors. 
The writer of Acts, little imagining that he is writ- 
ing a considerable section of an infallible Bible, 
follows their example. Comparing the language of 
the speakers with his own, we find it is the same. 
They have his tricks of style, his turns of expres- 
sion, and his conciliatory type of thought. 

But the one great consideration which prevents 
our trusting the Acts as real history and biography 
is that it offers us a representation of Paul, and his 
relations to the other Apostles, widely different 


25 6 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


from that which we have found in his Epistles. 
Even the Jewish Christianity of the Apocalypse 
would be an incomprehensible riddle if the Acts 
had to be accepted as a valid testimony to the 
character of the Apostolic age. But in comparison 
with Paul’s Epistles, the Acts at once exhibit their 
true character. Under these startling miracles, 
these charming narratives, these eloquent speeches, 
these entrancing pictures of the unity and harmony 
of the early Church, there is a writing in invisible 
ink, declaring the real purpose of the book. Hold 
it up to that great flame of godly indignation, which 
burns so hot in Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians 
and Galatians, and this writing becomes clear as 
day. 

The first thing that impresses us in reading about 
Paul in Acts is his devotion to Jerusalem and the 
temple ritual. “ I must by all means keep this 
feast that cometh at Jerusalem,” he is represented 
as saying, and again as leaving his successful work 
at Ephesus to go to Jerusalem, as being reluctant 
to stay longer in Asia, because he hasted to be in 
Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. So he shaves 
his head at Cenchrea, because he has taken a vow. 
And he does this again at Jerusalem, with four 
others, who cannot pay their own expenses, to 
prove that he is just as good a Jew as ever. He 
is represented as circumcising Timothy. His re. 
fusal to circumcise Titus is passed over in silence^ 
though we have Paul's own word for it that the 
Jerusalem Apostles demanded it. and he refused to 
grant it. Again we have no mention of Paul’s con- 


ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. 

flict with Peter at Antioch, when he withstood him 
to his face, because he deserved to be blamed. 

But not only are Paul’s most striking characteris- 
tics, as consciously avowed and unconsciously ex- 
hibited in his own Epistles, suppressed in Acts , or 
contradicted ; the part he played in the great work 
of universalizing Christianity is totally misrepre- 
sented, if his own statements are to be depended 
on. According to these statements his mission from 
the very first was to the Gentiles. According to 
Acts he began his Christian preaching at Jerusalem, 
among his own countrymen, and only with reluc- 
tance did he turn from them to preach the Gospel 
to the Gentiles. Everywhere he is represented as 
systematically seeking the Jews first, and only turn- 
ing from them to the Gentiles on compulsion of 
their human rage, or the divine interposition. His 
own representations in his Epistles are diametrically 
opposed to this. Nor do his representations agree 
any better with those of this book in regard to his 
relation to the other Apostles concerning his work 
among the Gentiles. He represents it as being origi- 
nal with him, undertaken of his own motion, and 
carried on without their counsel or encouragement, 
though not without their constant and annoying 
interference. Acts represents his Gentile work as 
carried on under the supervision and the guidance 
of the Jerusalem party. It represents Peter as en- 
tertaining the views of Paul from the beginning; 
as being before him in preaching the Gospel to the 
Gentiles ; it represents the Gentile Christians at 
Antioch as being amply recognized by Peter and 


258 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


the twelve before the appearance of Paul upon the 
scene. Yet another respect in which the Paul of 
Acts is not the Paul of his Epistles, is in regard to 
his addresses. They contain nothing characteristic ; 
to his great doctrine of justification by faith only 
one faint allusion. It is hardly too much to say 
that the discourses of Peter are more Pauline than 
those of Paul. Certain it is that, taken in the 
mass, the Paul of Acts is more like the Peter of the 
Epistles than he is like their author. His conduct at 
Jerusalem, where he has his head shaved with four 
impecunious vagabonds, and shuts himself up in 
the temple seven days to show his devotion to the 
law, was far more hypocritical than Peter’s when he 
withstood him to the face at Antioch. And certain 
it is the Peter of the Acts is far more like the Paul 
of the Epistles than he is like the Peter there por- 
trayed. 

What shall we say of this remarkable double 
transformation ? First, that if Paul was such a man 
as he is represented in the book of Acts he is but 
little worthy of our admiration, leaving the Epistles 
out of the account. But second, taking the Epis- 
tles into the account, that either Acts misrepresents 
him grossly or he was not only a liar and a hypo- 
crite, but a blustering Falstaff, bragging of heroisms 
of which fys was incapable and slandering men who 
were of larger mould and better spirit than himself. 
Choose, as you must, one or the other of these two 
alternatives. For me, I chose long since. I ac- 
cept as simple truth Paul’s representation of him- 
self, and of the other apostles and his relation to 


ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. 259 

them, in his Epistles. And therefore I cannot ac- 
cept the representation of the book of Acts. As I 
said at the beginning, it is a theological romance. 

But a romance with a set purpose. Be certain 
that it was not by any accident that the attributes 
of Peter and Paul were so inextricably shuffled up 
together, that they masquerade in each other’s armor, 
fight with each other’s weapons, talk in each other’s 
voices. It is not accidental that we have twelve 
chapters devoted to Peter and then about as many 
more devoted to Paul. It is not accidental that for 
almost every event in Peter’s career there is a par- 
allel event in Paul’s ; that if Peter confutes Simon 
the magician, Paul must confute Elymas the sor- 
cerer; if Peter raises Tabitha from the dead, Paul 
must raise Eutychus; if Peter has a vision, Paul 
must have one for a similar purpose ; if Peter’s 
shadow could work miracles, so could Paul’s hand- 
kerchief. It is not accidental that the sufferings of 
Peter also are represented as parallel with those of 
Paul ; that two men of striking individuality are 
represented as being alike as two peas. To repre- 
sent them as being so alike is the very purpose for 
which the book was written : in order to conciliate 
the rivalries and hatreds of the opposing Pauline and 
Petrine parties in the early church. The writer was 
himself a Paulinist ; himself a Universalist. And 
his book was written as the basis of a compromise 
between his party and the other.* Come, said he, 
let us Paulinize Peter and Petrinize Paul ; let us 

* A secondary object was to ingratiate Christianity with the officials 
of the Roman Empire. The Roman officials with whom Paul comes 
in contact find no fault in him. 


26 o 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


pretend that they were not so very different ; that 
they always got along smoothly together; that 
Peter was the first apostle to the Gentiles ; that 
Paul was a devout adherent of the law. Is not this 
better than to go on fighting? United we stand ; di- 
vided we fall. Apparently the other party said 
Amen. Certain it is there was a compromise, on 
pretty much this basis, in the second century. A 
Catholic church was formed midway between the 
two extremes of Petrine Ebionitism and Pauline 
Gnosticism. Its spirit became more and more 
Pauline and its name and tradition more and more 
Petrine. 

The date of this compromise was a little subse- 
quent to that of the third Gospel: about 125 A. D. 
Written by the same person as the author of the 
third Gospel it could not have been written by 
Luke. Like the third Gospel it contains memorials 
of a much earlier date, it may be from the hand of 
Luke. The passages in which the first person 
plural appears * are of this nature but they have all 
been made over by the final editor. 

The author of this book was a person of excellent 
intentions. But in order to further them he delib- 
erately falsified the character and conduct of the 
man who had made Christianity a universal religion 
and, instead of the true Paul, endeavored to palm 
off upon us a poor, puny, double of the apostle of 
the circumcision. He did not mean to slander the 
apostle to the Gentiles. But it takes a hero to com- 
prehend a hero. And this man was not a hero but a 

* Chapter xvi., 10, for the first time. 


ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. 26 1 

valet with a valet-soul. If anywhere in heaven the 
great shade of Paul has encountered his poor ghost I 
fear that he has had a very disagreeable experience. 
We cannot be too thankful that it was not suffered 
we should know of Paul only by this piece of whole- 
sale misrepresentation but that in his own Epistles 
we can look upon the actual man and know him 
for the stalwart hero that he was. 


EIGHTH LECTURE. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 

It seems almost preposterous to invite your at- 
tention, for a single hour, to the consideration of a 
subject which has been more engrossing than any 
other of a literary character. If all the books that 
have been written about the four Gospels could be 
brought together, it might be hyperbolical to say, 
“The world itself could not contain them,” but 
they would make up a library of many thousand 
volumes. And still the number grows. Hardly a 
year goes by, that one or more new treatises upon 
the Gospels is not added to the multitude already 
written. And let me say, that if you wish to think 
and speak with absolute confidence about them, 
your only chance is to choose some one writer, and 
pin your faith to him. Let it be Davidson or 
Strauss, Keim or Baur; but let it be one, and one 
only. The moment that you try a second, there 
is an end of perfect confidence. Admit a third, and 
dogmatism becomes even less possible. Each of 
these authors by himself, and twenty more, seems 
perfectly conclusive, but all of them together breed 
confusion, head-ache and despair. Having myself 
felt obliged to compare as many as possible of these 
writers, you will not expect me to be entirely cer- 
262 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


263 


tain upon every point, for, like the men who sprung 
from Cadmus’ fatal seed, their certainties are often 
mutually destructive. And yet, as the result of 
reading many of these writers long and carefully, 
a candid person will, I am persuaded, find some 
general convictions emerging with much force and 
clearness. I shall content myself with indicating 
some of these this evening. 

There is nothing strange or unaccountable in the 
interest which has attached to the four Gospels. 
Rather the wonder is, that, for one who has devoted 
himself to the study of them, there has not been a 
score, for they contain well nigh our sole account 
of the earthly career of one who is esteemed to-day 
by three hundred and forty millions of people, and 
these the most civilized people in the world, to be 
none other than the infinite and eternal God, the 
maker and the ruler of this boundless universe. 
The existence of Jesus is implied in the New Test- 
ament, outside of the Gospels, but hardly an inci- 
dent of his life is mentioned, hardly a sentence that 
he spoke has been preserved. Paul, writing from 
twenty to thirty years after his death, has but a 
single reference to anything he ever said* or did. 
Of Jewish mention of Jesus outside of the New 
Testament there is not a single valuable instance. 
The famous passage in Josephus, whose life began 
soon after that of Jesus ended, is considered by the 
best authorities to be wholly an interpolation/)* 

His bare allusion to him in another passage, where 

» 

* “ Do this in remembrance of me.” — 1 Cor., n, 25. 

f For argument see Keim’s Jesus of Nazara,No\. I., p. 24. 


2(54 


THE BIBLE OF TO- DA Y. 


he speaks of “ James, the brother of Jesus, the so- 
called Christ,” is less certainly spurious. The earli- 
est Talmudic references are remote and scanty and 
contemptible. The earliest references to Jesus by 
pagan authors date from the beginning of the sec- 
ond century. Tacitus mentions the mere fact of 
his crucifixion ; Suetonius imagines him to have 
been a seditious Roman Jew living in the time of 
Claudius ! The younger Pliny, Governor of By- 
thinia, in 104 A. D., writes an interesting letter 
about the Christians of that region, but it contains 
no reference to the events of Jesus’ life. So, then, 
for knowledge of the man whose name has been 
above all names, the fountain-head of love more 
tender, strife more keen and hatreds more intense, 
than have arisen from any other personal source, 
we are thrust back upon the four Gospels as our only 
biographical material. The four cover only a few 
more than one hundred pages. A three-volume 
novel is four times as copious in its contents as this 
four-volume biography of the most central and com- 
manding figure in the human order. Surely from 
any point of view, the most orthodox or the most 
heterodox, this four-volume biography deserves to 
be a subject of the most careful study, and the most 
engrossing interest. 

But “ this four-volume biography” is an expres- 
sion that will not stand a moment’s searching ob- 
servation. We have here, not a single continuous 
work made up of four consenting parts. We have 
four separate and individual wholes ; four different 
biographies of one and the same person. Different, 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


265 

and yet of the four there are three which, in spite 
of minor differences, have a strong general resem- 
blance. These, the first three, are called by the 
critics the Synoptic Gospels, because a synopsis or 
general view of the three taken together is quite 
possible, in which the Fourth cannot be included. 
It is a common mistake to suppose that the Syn- 
optic Gospels are so called because they give a 
synopsis of the discourses of Jesus, or the events of 
his life. These Synoptics, which are so much alike, 
are all about equally different from the fourth Gos- 
pel. I say about equally because the spirit of Luke 
approaches that of John most nearly ; that of Mark 
next ; while that of Matthew is most diverse from 
it, as concerns the relations of Christianity to the 
Jewish nation and religion. Apart from this, the 
Synoptics differ equally from John . They give us 
an entirely different idea of the personality of Jesus, 
of the length and course of his ministry, and of the 
style and nature of his teachings from that presented 
by the Fourth Gospel. The most various ingenuity 
has been developed to account for these divergen- 
cies. But that the divergencies are there is not de- 
nied by any. Says Canon Westcott, one of the 
most conservative of critics, “ It is impossible to 
pass from the Synoptic Gospels to the Fourth with- 
out feeling that the transition involves the passage 
from one world of thought to another. No famili- 
arity with the general teachings of the Gospels, 
no wide conception of the character of the Saviour 
is sufficient to destroy th£ contrast which exists in 
form and spirit between the earlier and later narra- 


266 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


tives.” Nevertheless, Canon Westcott is persuaded 
that the Fourth Gospel proceeded from “ the be- 
loved disciple,” in the last decade of the first cen 
tury, when he was between ninety and one hundred 
years old. 

The question of the date and authorship and 
character of the Fourth Gospel is by far the most 
interesting question suggested by the four Gospels, 
but there are questions touching the mutual rela 
tions of the three Synoptics which are hardly less 
interesting or important. The traditional idea is 
that the four Gospels were written by the persons 
whose names they bear ; two of them by Apostles, 
Matthew and John, and two of them by specially 
qualified companions of Peter and Paul. But there 
is nothing in the Synoptics declaratory of the au- 
thorship of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the 
tendency was so strong among the early Christians 
to seek for Apostolic warrant for this writing, or 
that opinion, that every tradition of Apostolic au- 
thorship or sanction must be closely scrutinized. 
The case of the Fourth Gospel is different. The 
Apostle John is clearly indicated as its author. 
Should we be compelled to deny that the Synop- 
tics were written by Matthew, Mark and Luke, we 
should only be going counter to a late and irrespon- 
sible tradition. But should we be obliged to deny 
the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel, we 
should be going counter to the most positive indi- 
cations of the Gospel itself. The differences of the 
Synoptics from each other in contents and char- 
acter, I shall indicate as I treat of them in the New 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


26; 

Testament order. The differences between the 
Synoptics and the Fourth I shall reserve until I 
come to this. 

“The Gospel according to St. Matthew,” as it is 
superscribed in our common version, is made up of 
twenty-eight chapters, which naturally fall into 
three parts. Chapters I.-IV. contain a genealogy of 
Jesus, an account of his birth and infancy, the 
preaching of John the Baptist and the baptism of 
Jesus by him ; then, following the imprisonment of 
John the Baptist, the entrance of Jesus on his inde- 
pendent ministry and the calling of his first disci- 
ples — two pairs of brothers, Peter and Andrew, 
James and John. These four chapters make up the 
first or introductory part. Chapters V.-XV1II. make 
up the second part, and cover the Galilean ministry 
of Jesus. Chapters XIX.-XXVIII., the third and con- 
cluding part, cover his Judean ministry, and the 
incidents of his death and resurrection at Jerusalem. 

Criticism has sometimes attempted to separate 
the first two chapters from the remainder of the 
Gospel as a spurious addition. But the earliest and 
best MSS. do not justify any such procedure. Le- 
gendary and miraculous elements are more promi- 
nent here than in the body of the Gospel. But this 
is only what we should expect, because of the greater 
remoteness of the birth and infancy of Jesus, and 
the natural tendency of such elements to cluster 
around the beginning, as around the end, of life. 
Miracles always multiply as the narration gets re- 
moved from the event. But there is good reason 
to believe that these chapters, at least the whole of 


268 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


them, did not form a part of the original Gospel of 
the Hebrews upon which Matthew would seem to 
have been based. These opening chapters, as the 
most casual observer can perceive, are made up of 
incongruous elements. The genealogy deduces 
Jesus from David through Joseph. Either its au- 
thor had not heard of his miraculous birth, or he 
did not believe it. The miraculous birth of Jesus 
makes the genealogy through Joseph superfluous and 
absurd. 

The first three chapters of the second part con- 
tain the Sermon on the Mount, and constitute the 
richest section of the Synoptic Gospels. The length 
of this discourse has frequently been cited as a par- 
allel to the protracted discourses of the Fourth Gos- 
pel, but the internal evidence is ample that in the 
present instance we have fragments of a great many 
different discourses arbitrarily joined together. 
Some famous hill-side talk became a nucleus around 
which various sentences, spoken at other times, 
gradually clustered. In Mark and Hike the sen- 
tences, which are here joined together into a tolera- 
bly consistent whole, are assigned to various occa- 
sions. But there is internal evidence, not only of 
spontaneous growth, but of conscious manipulation. 
The discourse has been carefully worked up into its 
present form, yet not so carefully but that several 
of the joints are easily apparent. Chapters VIII. 
and IX. are full of miracles. Chapter X. gives the 
full list of the twelve Disciples and the instructions 
given to them by Jesus, instructions which smack 
very strongly of a later time. Actual experience of 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


2(X \ ) 

persecution is here reflected back upon the time and 
thought of Jesus. Chapters XI. and XII. report the 
wandering ministry of Jesus, and his first conflict 
with the Pharisees. Chapter XIII. groups into arbi- 
trary unity a number of striking parables, which 
certainly, when originally spoken, did not come gal- 
loping upon each other’s heels in any such fashion. 
Equally arbitrary is the grouping of events in chap- 
ters XIV. and XVII. And yet a certain progress is 
discernible. The period of conflict becomes more 
clearly marked, and it hardly needs a prophet to 
foretell the ultimate catastrophe. 

Part third begins with the departure of Jesus 
from Galilee, and in the twenty-first chapter we have 
his entry into Jerusalem. Here his contention with 
the Pharisees waxes hotter, and in chapter XXIV. he 
is represented as predicting the destruction of Je- 
rusalem, the downfall of the Jewish State, and his 
own return from heaven to set up his Messianic 
Kingdom on the earth. So far as these predictions 
were fulfilled it is quite certain that they were not 
originally spoken in their present form ; that this 
was shaped by subsequent experience. If Jesus 
had thus predicted the destruction of the temple, 
could his disciple John in the Apocalypse have con- 
tradicted him to the extent of prophesying the 
preservation of both the city and the temple? If 
the city and temple had not been destroyed, we 
may be very sure we should have had no such 
prophecy as this put into the mouth of Jesus. 

But it may be said, Jesus did not return from 
Heaven and yet his prophecy of his return is frankly 


2JO THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY, 

given. I answer, The expectation of Jesus' second 
coming was still current in the forepart of the second 
century, when the first Gospel reached its present 
form. Did this expectation project itself upon the 
past? — impose itself upon the speech of Jesus? Or 
did actual expressions on the part of J esus give rise 
to the expectation among his followers? This is a 
very interesting question, but it is a very difficult 
one to answer. The first alternative is accepted by 
Matthew Arnold, Davidson, Schenkel, Baur, and 
many other critics ; the second by Strauss and Keim ; 
also by Drs. Noyes* and Martineau. Still others 
explain away the natural meaning of the- words into 
some spiritual significance. This only is wholly im- 
permissible. But between the above alternatives it 
is easier to make a wilful than a deliberate choice. 
I am myself inclined to the opinion that Jesus did 
anticipate his second coming. On any other sup- 
position the belief of John and Paul, and of the early 
Church generally, is, if not wholly unaccountable, 
very nearly so. But on this point I must refuse to 
dogmatize. 

In Chapter XXV. we have the impressive parables 
of the virgins and the talents, together with the 
striking allegory of the sheep and goats. To what 
extent these had originally a special Messianic mean- 
ing, — the coming of the bridegroom and “ the lord 
of those servants ” coinciding with the coming of the 
Son of Man in his glory, and all the holy angels 
with him, — it is not easy to decide. It is entirely 
possible that their original intention was moral and 

* In the last years of his teaching at Cambridge. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS . 271 

universal and that the bias of Jesus’ contemporaries 
attached to them a special meaning. Certain it is 
that hardly anywhere in the New Testament have 
we anything that lends itself so readily to simple 
moral uses as these parables of the virgins and the 
talents, and this allegory of the sheep and the goats. 
The popular doctrines of salvation by belief or magic, 
with their contempt of “ mere morality,” must go 
elsewhere for aid and sustenance. They will not 
find them here. The three concluding chapters de- 
tail the circumstances of the arrest and trial and 
crucifixion of Jesus, followed by the story of his 
resurrection. Barring a few apocryphal additions* 
these chapters, till the death of Jesus, are charac- 
terized by a remarkable dignity and self-restraint. 
Surely the process of natural selection in this in 
stance did achieve the preservation of the fittest. 

Consider next some of the absolute and relative 
characteristics of this Gospel. Concerning these 
the critics are sufficiently agreed. It is the most 
Jewish Gospel of the four; in fact the most Jewish 
book in the New Testament, with the exception of 
the Apocalypse and the Epistle of James. Some of 
the more conspicuous Jewish traits areas follows: 
Jesus is sent only to the lost sheep of the house of 
Israel ; the twelve are forbidden to go among the 
Gentiles or the Samaritans ; they are to sit on twelve 
thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel ; the 
genealogy of Jesus is traced back to Abraham and 
there stops ; the works of the law are frequently in- 

* Such as the dream of Pilate’s wife and the narrative in XXVII. 

52. 


2J2 


1 HE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


sisted on ; there is a superstitious regard for the 
Sabbath;* the preeminence of the apostle Peter. 
Nowhere else in the New Testament is the desire 
so obvious to force from the Old Testament a con- 
fession favorable to the Messianic claim of Jesus. 
A distinct anti-Pauline tendency is affirmed by some 
of the Tubingen critics, but upon the strength of 
dataf which are not entirely satisfactory. 

The next most striking characteristic after this 
Jewish tendency is the unmistakable presence here 
and there of elements incongruous with this. To 
say that the Gospel is a union of contradictions 
would be too severe ; for it is never anti-Jewish like 
the fourth Gospel. But plus the narrow Jewish 
tendency there is a liberal Jewish tendency discover- 
able in many places. Instances of this are to be 
found in the story of the Canaanitish woman,f the 
worship of the heathen magi, the saying of Jesus 
(VIIL, io) that he had not found in Israel such faith 
as the heathen centurion’s, his freedom from Sab- 
batical superstition (Chap. XII., 1-9) ; and there are 
many others.* Now what are we to say of this 
house divided against itself — of this internal contra- 
diction ? That these divergent statements represent 
an earlier and later stage of the development of 
Jesus? This explanation has been offered, but it 
is wholly insufficient, and a much more rational ex- 
planation is at hand. It is that we have here two 
different stages of the development of Christianity : 
first, a narrow Jewish and then a liberal Jewish stage. 

* Chap. XXIV.,. 20. 

f Such as Chap. XI., 12. and XXIV., ir. 

i XV., 28. 

* Chap. XXIV., 14; XXVIII., 18; XXVII., 24, 25 ; XXI., 43 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


273 


But though it is not impossible that the final editor 
of the Gospel, himself a liberal Jew, should have 
added liberal elements of % his own to an original 
basis with which he had little sympathy, it is much 
likelier that the author of the Gospel in its present 
form was a mere compiler and one by no means 
critical, who selected from two or more documents, 
more or less Jewish, whatever was most pleasing to 
his taste. The existence of such prior documents 
does not depend alone upon these contradictions. 
There are double narratives of the same event in 
several instances which do not admit of any other 
rational explanation. A narrow Jewish document 
was used much more freely than a less narrow, so 
that the narrow Jewish element preponderated in 
the finished work. 

A third principal characteristic of the first Gos- 
pel is co-extensive with its general purpose, which is 
to set forth Jesus as the Messiah promised to the 
Jews. It is preeminently the Messianic Gospel. Its 
frequently recurring formula, “ that it might be ful- 
filled,” betrays the writer’s animus. But of his 
many would-be-prophecies it must be confessed that 
hardly one has such a meaning in its old Testament 
connection as he ascribes to it. For the most part 
some merely verbal resemblance is sufficient for his 
purpose. 

To suppose that the Apostle Matthew wrote our 
present Gospel, based as it is on various prior docu- 
ments, is manifestly absurd. Not until the year 173, 
A. D., is it ascribed to him.* And what is more, there 

* By Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis. 


274 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


is no evidence until about this time of the existence 
of the Gospel in its present form. A passage in 
the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas has been urged 
against this statement, but, carefully considered, it 
cannot bear the weight that has been put upon it.* 
A saying of Papias, dating from about the middle 
of the second century, is frequently cited as a testi- 
mony to Matthew’s authorship of our present Gos- 
pel. But the saying is, “ Matthew composed the 
oracles in the Hebrew dialect, and everyone inter- 
preted them as he was able.” But our present Gos- 
pel bears no trace of being a translation from the 
Hebrew. There was, however, in the early church 
a Gospel of the Hebrews in Greek, which possibly, 
and even probably, was a translation, in part at 
least, of the original Hebrew Matthew. But this 
Gospel of the Hebrews existed in various forms, one 
of which was the intensely Jewish Gospel of the Ebi - 
onites y the Ebionites being the narrowest Jewish 
Christians of the second century. The most primi- 
tive form of it was probably a collection of dis- 
courses — the “ oracles” of Papias. The documents 
made use of by the final author of our present Gos- 
pel were probably for the most part some of the 
various editions of the Gospel of the Hebrews. The 
original oracles were written, likely enough, not 
long before the destruction of Jerusalem. But it is 
not likely that the Gospel assumed its present form 
before ioo A. D.f If it were possible to separate 
the whole of the original matter from the later ad- 
* Supernatural Religion, Vol. I., p. 236. 
f Baur says 130-34 ; Davidson 100 ; Keim circum 90 A.D. 


THE TOUT GOSPELS . . 


27S 


ditions, w should have a tradition of the discourses 
of Jesus cr.ly about forty years later than his death.* 
Even then there would be plenty of room for imper- 
fect memory, amplification and distortion. Never- 
theless this is the nearest approach that we can 
make to the actual personality of Jesus and his 
actual words. We are at a still further remove 
from him in all the other Gospels. Certainty that 
he spoke one sentence, just as we have it here re- 
corded, is of course impossible. Stenographers and 
phonographs had not been invented in his day. 
But memory was surer when the demand on it was 
greater. The chances are that many of these say- 
ings report with tolerable exactness the afctual 
speech of Jesus. They have an individuality which 
can hardly be fictitious. The incidents with which 
they are connected are less to be depended on: 
And yet again, for incident as well as teaching, this 
as the fountain head. If we would, we could not 
have it otherwise. Nor would we if we could ; so 
strong and sweet a face is that we dimly see through 
these meshes of legend and contradiction ; so deep 
and rich and penetrating is the voice we hear. 

The next Gospel in the New Testament, but not, 
as we shall see, in chronological order, is “ The Gos- 
pel according to St. Mark.” It is the shortest Gos- 
pel of the four. It has only sixteen chapters to 
Matthew's twenty-eight and Luke s twenty-three. 
It i» very different from Matthew ; poorest where 
Matthew is richest, in the discourses of Jesus. It 
is the Gospel of action rather than of speech. For 

* Fixed at the 3'ear 29 of our era by the best authorities. 


276 


THE BIBLE OE TO-DA Y. 


merly, because it was the shortest Gospel, it was 
considered by many critics the earliest ; Matthew 
and Luke expansions of its briefer history. This 
was a most uncritical assumption, as if condensa 
tion were not quite as often as expansion the aim 
of editorial work. Even those who now contend 
for the priority of Mark do not contend for the 
priority of the present Gospel, but for that of a 
primitive Mark . A suggestion of this primitive 
Mark is found in Papias of Hierapolis (circum 150), 
who says, as quoted by Eusebius, “ Mark, being the 
interpreter of Peter, wrote exactly whatever he re- 
membered ; but he did not write in order the things 
that were spoken or done by Christ.” Without a 
word of comment, Dr. E. H. Sears* refers to this 
passage, which he shrewdly abstains from quoting, as 
evidence that Papias was acquainted with our Mark . 
That the remark of Papias did not refer to our Mark 
is abundantly evident to any candid mind. Our 
Mark is written “ in order;” with as much consecu- 
tiveness as either Matthew or Luke . Indeed it is 
written for the most part in the same order as these. 
Moreover, a Gospel written by the companion of 
Peter, as Mark was, according to Papias and other 
representations, would naturally have given Peter 
some precedence of the other Apostles, or at least 
have mentioned him more frequently than the other 
Evangelists. But Peter has less precedence here 
than in Matthew , and less mention is made of *iim. 
The story of his walking on the sea, and also the 
famous, “ Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I 

* The Heart of Christ , p. 140. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


2 ;; 

build my church,” are omitted altogether. The 
modesty of Peter does not account for these omis- 
sions, because he must have been already dead 
when they were made by Mark, supposing him to 
have written the Gospel. But counting out, as we 
are bound to, this testimony of Papias, we have not 
a particle of external evidence that Mark wrote this 
Gospel, not a statement* to this effect till about 
190 A. D. Then we get a perfectly clear statement 
of Irenaeus. But this was more than a hundred 
years after the time of Mark. Such testimony is 
worth very little ; without internal confirmation 
absolutely nothing. Matthew Arnold, who accepts 
a fragment of Claudius Apollinaris as evidencef of 
the existence and exclusive use of our four Gospels 
as canonical in 173 A. D., declares, “ But he is really 
our last witness. Ascending to the times before 
him, we find mention of the Gospel , of Gospels , of 
Memorabilia and written accounts of Jesus, by his 
Apostles and their followers. We find incidents 
from the life of Jesus; sayings of Jesus quoted. 
But we look in vain in Justin Martyr [150] or Poly- 
carp [died 1 66] or Ignatius [died 105] or Clement 
of Rome [died 101] either for an express recogni- 
tion of the four canonical Gospels, or for a distinct 
mention of any one of them. No doubt the men- 
tion of an Evangelist’s name is unimportant, if his 

* The Canon of Muratori (180 A.d.) only implies a second Gospel ; 
our sepond, very likely, but whether as Mark’s, we cannot even 
guess. 

\ Tried and found wanting by the author of Supernatural Religion , 
Vol. I., p. 185. 

\ Concerning the existence of a book, but not concerning its au. 
thenticity. 


2;8 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


narrative is evidently quoted, and if we recognize 
without hesitation his form of expression.” But 
till the last quarter of the second century none of 
our four Gospels are evidently quoted. The method 
of Tischendorf and Dr. Sears and other critics is to 
infer the existence of our Gospels from every phrase 
they meet with in the Fathers similar to any phrase 
in our Gospels. This may be honest, but it is at 
least ridiculous. As if “ many” had not “ taken in 
hand,” as Luke confesses, “ to set forth in order a 
declaration of those things which” were “ most 
surely believed” by Christian folk ! As if these 
declarations , Gospels of the Hebrews, Gospels of 
James and Peter, and so on, were not in good re- 
pute and freely quoted ! As if the Gospel of the 
Hebrews were not so similar to our Matthew that 
even St. Jerome at first thought them identical! 
Allow these circumstances their due weight, and 
you will see the folly of confidently inferring the 
existence of our Gospels even from the most perfect 
reproduction of their phrases in the writings of the 
second century. Certain of their existence, we can- 
not be before Apollinaris at the earliest (173 A. D.) 
To be absolutely certain, say before Irenseus, about 
190 A. D. He is at any rate the first to name Mark 
as the author of our second Gospel. This late opinion 
is not supported by any internal evidence. On the 
contrary the internal evidence is conclusive of an 
unknown author. Subsequent to both Matthew and 
Luke, he must have written the Gospel about 120, 
and probably at P ome, the Latinisms of his style, 
and the apparent motive of his work, strongly sug- 


THE FOUR GOSPELS, 279 

gesting that he was a Jewish citizen of the Eternal 
City. 

A superstitious sentimentalism has not failed to 
find in each of the four Gospels a charming indi 
viduality, a necessary contribution to our perfect 
understanding of the personality and thought of 
Jesus. But in sober truth if we had only Matthew 
of the three Synoptics, our means of apprehending 
Jesus would be very slightly diminished. With 
Luke we should indeed lose the most touching of all 
parables, that of the prodigal son,* but of Mark it 
may be confidently affirmed that it is almost entirely 
superfluous. Of valuable incident it adds next to 
nothing ; of significant teaching, even less. In this 
Gospel there are only twenty-four verses which are 
not contained in either Matthew or Luke. But 
the number of resemblances to Matthew is much 
greater than the number to Luke, and in the former 
case they are much closer than in the latter. Hence 
while it is as certain as need be that the author made 
use of our Matthew as a principal authority, it is 
not so certain that he also made use of Luke .f If 
he did not it is still easy to account for those things 
which he has in common with Luke only. We have 
only to suppose that he had, besides our own Mat. 
thew, some one or more of those declarations which 
"‘many” had “set forth in order” and which Luke 
confessedly made use of. But Mark's knowledge of 
Luke is almost necessary to account for the existence 
of the second Gospel, a neutral go-between, a com- 

* Also the Good Samaritan and some others. See below. 

f The more common opinion is that he did. Hilgenfeld argues ir 
the negative. 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


280 

promise between Matthew as too Petrine and Luke 
as too Pauline. In part, no doubt, abbreviation was 
the author’s motive. But over and above this the 
chances are that the different aspects of Matthew 
and Luke were found to be confusing to believers, 
and provocative of hostile criticism from without. 
Hence the idea of writing a shorter Gospel that 
should combine the most essential elements of both. 
Luke was itself a compromise between the opposing 
Jewish and universal tendencies of early Christian- 
ity, but “ Mark endeavors by avoidance and omission 
to effect what Luke did more by addition and con- 
trast. * * * * Luke proposed to himself to 

open a door for the admission of Pauline ideas 
without offending Gentile Christianity ; Mark on 
the contrary in a negative spirit to publish a Gospel 
which should not hurt the feelings of either party.” * 
Hence his avoidance of all those disputed questions 
which disturbed the Church during first quarter 
of the second century. The genealogy of Jesus is 
omitted ; this being offensive to Gentile Christians, 
and even to some of the more liberal Judaizers.f 
The supernatural birth of Jesus is omitted, this 
being offensive to the Ebionitish (extreme Jewish) 
and some of the Gnostic Christians. For every 
Judaizing feature that is sacrificed, a universal one 
is also sacrificed. Hard words against the Jews are 
left out, but, with equal care, hard words about the 
Gentiles. An interesting example is that of the 
Canaanitish woman. Jesus says in Matthew, “ It is 

* Strauss : Hew Life of Jesus vol. 1, p. 176. 

■{•See the Clementine Homilies, passim. 


7 HE FOUR GOSPELS. 28 1 

not meet to take the children’s bread and give it 
unto dogs.” Luke finds this so little to his taste 
that he omits it altogether. Mark modifies it so as 
signify the precedence of the Jews without the ex- 
clusion of the Gentiles. 

After its neutral, compromising character the 
most conspicuous trait of the second Gospel is its 
desire to magnify the personality of Jesus. To set 
forth Jesus as “the Son of God” is, we may say, 
declared to be the object of the Gospel in its open- 
ing verse.* To do this the writer does not rely 
upon the words of Jesus, to which he is compara- 
tively indifferent, but upon “ his mighty acts.” His 
power and influence are generally magnified ; not 
only by his miracles, but also by the effect of his 
presence, the crowds which followed him. His in- 
fluence over the demons is a very significant trait, 
inhering as it does in a dualistic conception that 
pervades the Gospel. Jesus is represented as a sort 
of Ormuzd, a Prince of Light, contending with a 
sort of Ahrimanes, the Prince of Darkness, under 
whose power the demons are ; but they are no 
match for the celestial energy of Jesus. In Mat- 
thew acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah, here accept- 
tance of him as the Son of God, is the one sign of a 
true disciple. 

A certain vividness of description in the second 
Gospel has often been regarded as a proof of its 
priority and its closeness of adherence to the facts 
recorded. But to the literary critic this superior 

* The Sinaitic Ms. omits “ the Son of God," but if this is an in. 
terpolation it is a very proper and suggestive one. 


282 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


vividness is but the effort of a writer essentially 
prosaic, to enliven his dull narrative with artificial 
ornaments. True the added traits are pretty 
enough ; but many of them are superfluous, and a 
few are positively absurd, and show how weak thf 
writer’s hold was on his materials. A notable ex- 
ample is his explanation of the fruitlessness of the 
fig tree : “ for the time of figs was not yet,” a good 
reason for its not having any figs, but surely not 
for cursing it. The secondary character of Mark 
is shown still further by its frequent obscurities, 
caused by its failure to embody a sufficient amount 
of the context of certain borrowed passages to ex- 
plain the text. 

The general structure of the Gospel is the same 
as that of Matthew. After a brief introduction, a 
second part narrates the story of the Galilean min- 
istry of Jesus, and a third part his journeys to Je- 
rusalem, his death and resurrection. In some an- 
cient MSS. the last chapter breaks off with the 
eighth verse, and many critics argue that verses 
9-20 were not originally a part of the Gospel. 
There is much to be said on both sides. Hilgenfeld 
considers them authentic, and also Davidson, but 
less confidently.* The verses contain nothing which 
we cannot well afford to lose. 

As Matthew was written to convince the Jews of 
the Messianic dignity of Jesus, so Mark was written 
to convince the Gentiles of his God-like majesty 
and power. In the second century, therefore, it 
was not superfluous. And, even now, it adds some- 

* Introduction to New Test vol. 11. , p. 112. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


283 

thing to our knowledge of early Christianity, though 
nothing to our knowledge of the life and character 
of Jesus. 

The gospel according to St. Luke is a much longer, 
fuller and richer gospel than its immediate predeces- 
sor. We have no external evidence of its authenticity 
before the canon of Muratori, 180 A. D., nor indeed 
any external evidence of its existence before this date. 
Supposing the Gospel of the heretic Marcion to have 
been a garbled Luke we should have evidence of its 
existence. But Marcion’s gospel was not, it would 
appear,* a garbled Luke, but one of the many decla- 
rations to which Luke refers in the first verse of his 
gospel. To the same sources must we ascribe such 
of Justin Martyrs quotations as are like and yet un- 
like Luke as we have it. The third g@spel was as- 
cribed to Luke because it was by the same author 
as the Acts, and the Acts had been ascribed to him 
because he figures in the Epistles as a companion of 
Paul, and no other companion, Timothy or Titus, 
would answer as well. But of real evidence that 
Luke wrote the Acts there is not a particle. It was 
written about 125 A. D., and Luke not long before, 
but earlier than Mark , (120 A. D.,) and later than 
Matthew , and so about 1 1 5 A. D., by whom we can- 
not say. 

The contents of Luke admit of a more various sub- 
division than those of Matthew and Mark. The first 
two chapters treat of the birth and infancy of John 
the Baptist and of Jesus. The most astonishing inge- 
nuity has never yet been able to reconcile these 

* Supernatural Religion , Vol. II., p. 79. 


284 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


chapters with the first two chapters of Matthew , 
While Matthew regards Bethlehem as Joseph’s 
place of residence, Luke does not, but Nazareth : 
and Bethlehem as the accidental birth-place of Jesus. 
This is but one discrepancy of many. Part second 
extends to Chapter IV., 13. It recites the circum- 
stances attendant on the early ministry of Jesus. 
The genealogy of Jesus which it contains is wholly 
irreconcilable with that in Matthew. But like that 
it derives Jesus from David through Joseph, and 
must therefore have originated in a circle of tradi- 
tion in which the miraculous birth of Jesus was not 
accepted as a fact. Once entered on the ministry 
of Jesus, the general arrangement of Luke is the same 
as that of Matthew. But there are several variations 
in the chronology of events in which Matthew gener- 
ally has the advantage of superior sense and truth. 
Luke's is the later and more careless hand. Part 
third, extending to Chapter IX., 50, covers the Gali- 
lean ministry of Jesus. The resemblances to 
Matthew are most numerous in this part. The next, 
to Chapter XXI., 38., is most peculiar to Luke . It is 
the most important section of the gospel. It con- 
tains all the great parables and the account of the 
conflict of Jesus with the Pharisees, synchronizing 
with the protracted journey of Jesus from Galilee 
to Jerusalem. The Galilean ministry is shorter than 
in Matthew. The going to Jerusalem is the great 
thing. Everything tends to a catastrophe from the 
beginning of the journey. The last three chapters 
cover the concluding events of the young prophet’s 
life, his arrest and trial, and death, and resurrection, 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


285 


There is a good deal of matter in Luke which we 
do not find in Matthew and Mark . In general it is 
not so rich in teaching as Matthew , though it is in- 
finitely superior to Mark in this respect. But in the 
Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan it has preserved 
two parables that Matthew well might covet. Other 
parables peculiar to it are those of the two debtors, 
the friend borrowing bread at night ; the rich man’s 
barns ; Dives and Lazarus ; the lost piece of silver ; 
the unjust steward ; the Pharisee and the publican. 
Several miracles are also peculiar to Luke : the raising 
of the widow of Nain’sson being the most remark- 
able. A good many little touches here and there 
are also peculiar to the third gospel, some of them 
unrivalled in their tenderness and beauty: Jesus 
weeping over Jerusalem ; his sayings, “ Daughters of 
Jerusalem weep not for me,” and “ Father into thy 
hands I commend my Spirit.” The ascension also 
is additional to Matthew , and is only vaguely repro- 
duced in Mark. 

The opening verse of Luke betrays a writer far re- 
moved from the events which he records,* but rich 
in written and in oral sources of information. The 
contemporaries are no longer on the stage. Between 
them and our author has intervened a period of lit- 
erary fertility. But none of its results satisfy him 
entirely. He thinks he can do better. We shall 
hardly agree with him, knowing, as we do, that the 
writer of our Matthew was among the “ many ” 

* So does his fearful blunder in regard to the taxing of Quirinus 
which is thrown back ten years from its true date. . See Davidson’s 
Introduction, Vol. II., p. 68, for comments on the ingenuity of the 
apologists 


286 


THE BIBLE CF TO-DA Y. 


whom he flatters himself he can improve upon. 
Besides our Matthew , he must have used a more 
primitive form of the same gospel, the Gospel of the 
Hebrews or of the Ebionites ; for some of his traits 
are even more strictly Jewish than Matthew's . 
Among his many sources we may also reckon Mar- 
cion’s gospel. But this did not contain the Prodigal 
Son, and so he must have had still other sources ; 
written perhaps ; perhaps oral. 

The traditional idea that the author of this gospel 
was a friend of Paul has a symbolic truth. He was 
a friend of Paul’s theory of Christianity. He had 
drunk deep at Paul’s Epistles. He reproduces his 
ideas and his words at every turn. The principal 
object of his gospel is to reconcile Paulinism and the 
more Jewish' forms of Christianity. Where Mark 
is negative in this attempt, he is positive. The op- 
position of the Jews to Jesus is the harsh prelude of 
a wider opportunity for his religion. The relation 
of Jesus to Judea is much less definite than in Mat- 
thew ; his relation to the Gentile world much more 
pronounced. The great parables of the Prodigal 
and the good Samaritan are full of Pauline univer 
salism. Jesus is not a national Messiah, but the 
Saviour of mankind. His genealogy instead of stop- 
ping at Abraham is carried up to Adam, the univer- 
sal parent. Seventy disciples are appointed, corre- 
sponding to the seventy nations of the world, as 
then reckoned, besides the twelve apostles corre- 
sponding to the twelve Jewish tribes. Omission as 
well as addition plays its part in this Paulinizing 
tendency. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


287 

But as in Matthew there is a contradiction between 
a narrow and less narrow Jewish Christianity so in 
Luke there is a contradiction between a more and less 
decided Pauline universalism. TheTtibingen expla- 
nation of this contradiction is that we have here a 
decidedly Pauline gospel, the same as that of Mar- 
cion, overlaid by the author of the Acts with his own 
scheme ior reconciling the conflicting tendencies of 
Petrine and Pauline Christianity. To this end he 
chooses the same methods as in Acts. “He did not, 
like the author of the Fourth Gospel, feel himself to 
be the man to put the evangelical tradition into the 
crucible and recast it all afresh, but was satisfied with 
bringing it into another shape by analysis, modifica- 
tion, and reconstruction.”* Part of his method was to 
allow both sides to have their say. The effect is some- 
times almost comical. Thus in Chapter XVI., 16, 
17, we read, “ The Law and the Prophets were until 
John; since that time the Kingdom of God is 
preached, and every man presseth into it. And 
it is easier for heaven and earth to pass than for one 
tittle of the law to fail.” Here, close upon the heels 
of an assertion that since the time of John the law 
has been superseded by the gospel, we have jammed 
in an absolutely contradictory expression. Were 
this the only instance it would be unaccountable, 
except upon the theory of interpolation. But the 
like occurs so often that we are at length convinced 
that there is method in the apparent madness — the 
method of an arbiter who attempts to reconcile op- 
posing interests by allowing each side to state its 

* Strauss’ New Life of Jesus, Vol I, p. 164. 


288 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


case. Yet notwithstanding these emendations and 
additions of the final author of this Gospel, its 
average effect is much more Pauline than that of 
either Matthew or Mark. We have in the three Syn- 
optics a distinct gradation from more to less Judaic, 
from less to more universal. And as in Matthew we 
have a more liberal afterthought of the final editor, 
so in Luke we have, not exactly a less liberal after- 
thought, but a less exclusively Pauline ; — a prelimin- 
ary draft of that scheme of compromise afterward set 
forth so much more fully and immorally in the book 
of Acts. In Luke no one is sacrificed, as Paul is in the 
later work, to the exigencies of the Catholic com- 
promise. And still we cannot help regretting that 
the Gospel did not come down to us in its original 
form,* though in its present form it is, if less con- 
sistent, more instructive. 

The transition from the Synoptic Gospels to the 
Fourth is a transition from one world of thought and 
feeling to another. The common explanation is 
that in the Fourth Gospel we have a view of the 
career and character of Jesus seen from a different 
standpoint, and under new conditions. The inci- 
dents narrated here, of which no mention is made 
in the other Gospels, are supposed to be supplemen- 
tary to those. John, writing long after the others, 
addressed himself to writing down the discourses 
and events which they had omitted. These expla- 
nations failing utterly to account for so much radi- 

* The explanation which I have given of the contradictory elements 
in Luke is that of the Tubingen school of critics. Its validity has 
often been impeached, but it is the most adequate explanation with 
which I am acquainted. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 289 

cal discrepancy as there is between the Fourth Gos- 
pel and the Synoptics, it is next discovered that a 
steady-going Englishman, a systematic Frenchman, 
a wonder-loving Italian and a mystical German 
would not give the same report of any series of 
remarkable events. In this parable the mystical 
German represents the fourth Evangelist. Never- 
theless, certain things in the career and character 
of Jesus were, or were not, so. If he was the man 
of Matthew’s Gospel, he was not the mysterious 
being of the Fourth. If his ministry was only one 
year long, it wasn’t three. If he only made one 
journey to Jerusalem, he did not make many. If 
his method of teaching was that of the Synop- 
tics, it was not that of the Fourth Gospel. If he 
was the Jew of Matthew , he was not the anti- Jew 
of John. It may be doubted whether any differ- 
ence of standpoint or subjective bias is sufficient to 
account for such differences of representation as there 
are between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics. 
But granting the possibility of this, Jesus was one 
thing or another, taught one thing or another, did 
one thing or another. What was he ? What did 
he teach ? What did he do ? It is an astonishing 
revelation, which includes such different representa- 
tions of its central personage without distinguishing 
them as true and false, or at least as more or less 
true. To compare small things with great, Voltaire 
seemed to Condorcet the wisest, greatest and the 
best of men. To Carlyle he seemed only “ the 
prince of persifleurs.” He could not have been 
both. And what sort of a revelation would it be 


290 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


of the character of Voltaire, which included both 
of these representations, and left us to judge be- 
tween them for ourselves? The difference between 
John and the Synoptics is certainly not of this na- 
ture, but it is equally great. 

Let us be more specific. The resemblances be- 
tween John and the Synoptics must not be over- 
looked. There are such resemblances, but they are 
confined to a few particulars : the cleansing of the 
temple; the feeding of the multitude; Jesus walking 
on the sea; the anointing of Jesus by a woman ; 
Jesus, public entry into Jerusalem; his indication of 
Judas as his betrayer; his prediction of Peter’s de- 
nial; his suffering and resurrection from the dead. 
But even here the resemblance is mixed up with a 
great deal of difference. The same fact — -apparently 
the same — is differently reported, and all the inge- 
nuity of the apologists is powerless to reconcile the 
incongruity. But so far the incongruity is hardly, 
if any, more than that between the different Synop- 
tics. Besides this incongruity with resemblance, we 
have the incongruity of independent narratives. 
Such are the most of those contained in the Fourth 
Gospel. Mark , as we have seen, has only twenty- 
four verses which are not contained in Matthew and 
Luke. Luke has perhaps one-third new matter. 
Two-thirds of John are absent from the three Syn- 
optics put together. Some of the more striking 
incongruities, with or without resemblance at some 
point, are as follows: The Synoptics represent Jesus 
as dying on the 1 5th Nisan, and as eating the paschal 
supper on the 14th ; John represents him as dying 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


29I 


on the 14th, and as not partaking of the passover at 
all. His cleansing of the temple in the Synoptics is 
the climax of his opposition to the prevailing ortho- 
doxy, and the immediate precursor of his arrest and 
crucifixion. John puts it at the beginning of his 
ministry. The apologists, by nothing daunted, say 
he repeated the act. But the historic law of parsi- 
mony — that as few extra events as possible must be 
imagined — forbids an hypothesis which has no justi- 
fying principle. According to the three Synoptics, 
as we have seen, the ministry of Jesus was princi- 
pally confined to Galilee. Not till the end of his 
ministry does he go up to Jerusalem and announce 
his spiritual Messiahship. Only once in the course 
of his ministry does he publicly appear in the eccle- 
siastical city, and then to meet his doom. In John 
his ministry is mainly in Judea. He makes his first 
appearance in Jerusalem, plunging at once in medias 
res , his first public act the cleansing of the temple. 
In the Synoptics his ministry is only one year long. 
In John it is from two to three. In the Synoptics 
he attends but one passover; in John several.* In 
the Synoptics we have a natural and human repre- 
sentation of the Jews. They are not all of one sort. 
Some are stiffly orthodox. Others are more liberal, 
inclining a willing ear to Jesus. But the Jews in 
John are not natural and human. They are a mere 
typical abstraction — typical of darkness opposing 
itself to the light. They are Chief Priests and 

* The expression “ how often, etc.,” in Matthew xxiii, 37, and Luke 
XIII, 34, on which the apologists rely to harmonize the Synoptics with 
John , is shown by Davidson to be a quotation from some book no 
longer extant. It is really Jehovah, or the Wisdom of Jehovah, not 
Jesus who is speaking. 


292 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


Pharisees. The Sadducees, the Herodians, the 
Scribes, so prominent in the Synoptics, do not ap- 
pear at all. A picture of Tenier’s is not more astir 
with natural human life than Matthew and Luke . 
Publicans and sinners jostle each other and the 
great-hearted Teacher on the narrow Galilean stage. 
In John for men and women we have types and 
shadows. The personages are as thin as ghosts, 
and through their translucent bodies we discern the 
artificial framework of the Gospel, and its dogmatic 
purpose. Of the principal personage this is particu- 
larly true. The Jesus of John is a mere phantom 
compared with the human being of the other Gos- 
pels. In Matthew he is the Jewish Messiah; in 
Mark the Son of God ; in Luke the Saviour of man- 
kind, but everywhere a human being of more or less 
exalted attributes ; miraculously born,* but not pre- 
existent. In the Fourth Gospel he is the pre-existent 
Logos or Word, co-eternal with the Father, consub- 
stantial with Him: “In the beginnning was the 
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word 
was God. All things were made by Him.” He is 
the Creator of the universe. Of the Jewish Mes- 
siah of Matthew he does not preserve a single trait. 
The man Jesus is a mere fleshly vehicle in which 
the Word incarnates itself. The spiritual relation 
of this mysterious being to his disciples and men 
generally is altogether different from that of Jesus 
in the Synoptics. In these the emphasis is upon 
conduct ; in John upon belief. It must be con- 
fessed that this Gospel, so tender, so spiritual, is the 

* In Matthew and Luke only. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


293 


great fountain-head of the intolerable doctrine of 
dogmatic salvation. Belief in Jesus as the Truth, 
as the only begotten Son of God, is here the one 
thing needful. The egotism with which Jesus in- 
sists upon his own spiritual grandeur would be in- 
tolerable even if we allowed his claim. It is a won- 
derful relief to know that all these representations 
correspond to nothing actual. The critics who have 
proved the Fourth Gospel unhistorical, have not only 
cleared the character of Jesus from a degrading im- 
putation, but they have done an equal service to the 
Deity, for whom we should lose all respect if he 
could thus insist upon his dignity and his pre- 
rogative. 

Everywhere in John we come upon a more de- 
veloped stage of Christianity than in the Synoptics. 
The scene, the atmosphere, is different. In the 
Synoptics Judaism, the temple, the law, the Mes- 
sianic Kingdom are omnipresent. In John they are 
remote and vague. In Matthew Jesus is always 
yearning over his own nation. In John he has no 
other sentiment for it than hate and scorn. In 
Matthew the sanction of the prophets is his great 
credential. In John his dignity can tolerate no 
previous approximation. “ All that came before 
me,” he says, “ were thieves and robbers.” Surely 
to put such narrowness as that into the mouth of 
Jesus was not to do him honor. 

The resurrection of Lazarus is peculiar to the 
Fourth Gospel. So is the resurrection of the widow 
of Nain’s son to the third, says the apologist. But 
in its setting the resurrection of Lazarus was the 


294 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

most important miracle that Jesus ever wrought 
Suspended animation was here out of the question. 
Lazarus had been dead four days, and decomposition 
had set in. His relation to the family of Lazarus 
gave a pathetic interest to the event. He came 
from beyond Jordan to work the miracle, after firs' 
permitting Lazarus to die, in order that he might 
perform a greater wonder. According to John it 
was this miracle which determined the Sanhedrim 
to put Jesus to death. It was the climax of his 
ministry. If the Synoptics had heard of this mira- 
cle, it is impossible that they should all have passed 
it by in silence, except upon the supposition of the 
apologists that such things were an every day oc- 
currence. 

The differences and contradictions which I have 
already named are quite sufficient to compel any 
candid person to admit that we must choose be- 
tween this Gospel and the other three as tolerably 
faithful representations of the life and character of 
Jesus, but they do not by any means exhaust the 
argument, or give a complete idea of the individu- 
ality of the fourth Evangelist. His miracles have 
all a special quality. He has only seven, to a score 
in Matthew, but every one is made to tell. In the 
Synoptics the miracles are acts of mercy. In John 
they are manifestations of the divine glory. And 
in every case the circumstances are exaggerated to 
enhance the wonder of the miracle. The noble- 
man’s son is healed at a distance. The impotent 
man has been afflicted thirty years. The blind 
man’s blindness was congenital. Lazarus “ has been 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


295 


dead four days, and now he stinketh.” Dr. Furness 
says this expression is not natural, and so he throws 
it out, really because if Lazarus had been so dead 
he doubts if even one as good* as Jesus could have 
raised him up. But evidently this expression was 
chosen with the utmost deliberation to enhance the 
greatness of the miracle. 

Another example of John’s individuality is the 
dualism that pervades his gospel. There is a dual- 
ism in Mark , as we have seen ; but there it is iso- 
lated ; here it is all-pervading. The Logos and the 
Prince of this world, — the devil, Satan, — are con- 
stantly opposed. So are the antitheses of light and 
darkness, spirit and flesh, truth and error, love and 
hatred, the children of the world and the children 
of the devil. 

But in no other respect does the difference of the 
Fourth Gospel from the Synoptics stand out so 
plainly as in respect to the method of Jesus’ self- 
communication, — the teaching of his truth to men. 
** Brief and concise were the sentences uttered by 
him,” says Justin Martyr. Nothing could be truer 
of the Synoptic Jesus, nothing could be less true of 
the Johannine Jesus. The Synoptic Jesus speaks 
in aphorisms and parables, the drift of which is 
purely moral. In John we have long articulated 
discourses.f In John we have not a single para- 

* According to Dr. Furness the goodness of Jesus is the foundation 
of his wonder-working power — a beautiful idea, but without the least 
support from average experience. The good man’s goodness is his 
only and sufficient miracle. 

f The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is long, but it is not artic- 
ulated. It is a mere aggregation of gnomic sayings. 


296 THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 

ble.* If we had not the synoptics to test them, we 
should suspect these wordy utterances of not being 
genuine reproductions of the method of Jesus. For 
it is noticeable that it is exactly the same style as 
that of the Evangelist himself. In the third chap- 
ter it is quite impossible to tell where Jesus leaves 
off, and the evangelist goes on. For these dis- 
courses to come from the same teacher as the para- 
bles and crisp sentences of the Synoptics would be 
a psychological miracle, as astounding as the resur- 
rection of Lazarus. The style of these discourses 
“ has been,” as Renan frankly says, “ unduly ad- 
mired. It has indeed fervor and occasionally a kind 
of sublimity, but also a something that is unreal, in- 
flated and obscure. It has an utter want of naivete. 
The author does not narrate, he demonstrates. 
Nothing can be more fatiguing than those long ac- 
counts of miracles, and those discussions turning on 
misapprehensions in which the adversaries of Jesus 
play the part of idiots. How much we prefer to 
this wordy pathos the sweet style, still purely He- 
braic, of the Sermon on the Mount, and that limpid 
narrative which makes the chain of the primitive 
evangelists ! These have no need constantly to re- 
peat that they have seen what they tell, and what 
they tell is true. Their sincerity, unconscious of 
any objections, has not that febrile thirst for re- 
peated attestations which shows that doubts/ in- 
credulity, have already set in. From the somewhat 

* The so-called parables of the Good Shepherd and the Vine are 
not, strictly speaking, parables. The difference is apparent at a 
glance. In a true parable the speaker does not appear as part of the 
machinery. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


297 


excited tone of the new narrator one would say that 
he fears not to be believed, and that he seeks to 
surprise the religion of his reader by strongly enf- 
phasized affirmations.” 

If now we turn from special characteristics to the 
general arrangement of the Gospel, we shall find 
that many of the characteristics we have named in- 
here in the essential quality of the work. Each of 
the S}moptics has his own personal tendency . No 
one of them writes simply to give a biographical ac- 
count. Each has his thesis to maintain : Matthew , 
that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah; Mark , that he 
was the Son of God ; Luke , that a Catholic Christian- 
ity is possible, inclusive of both Petrine and Pauline 
elements. But the tendency in John is much more 
strongly marked. The dogmatic purpose is every- 
thing. It compels everything to suit its purpose. 
The personality of Jesus, the facts of his career, his 
mode of speaking — all are as obedient to his impress 
as clay beneath the artist’s moulding hand. 

And what is this dogmatic purpose ? It is to ex- 
hibit Jesus as the incarnate Word of God: this 
against those who, on the one hand, held him to be 
only a wonder-gifted man, and on the other, denied 
that the Son of God had “ come in the flesh,” the 
Docetic Gnostics who denied that Jesus really suf- 
fered on the cross, affirming that the Eon Christ 
had no substantial body, but only the appearance of 
one. True, the Evangelist’s own thought was only 
a shade different from this. How could he be so 
earnest and so violent against it? Simply because 
“dogmatic minds are never more severe than to 


298 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA Y. 


those who differ from them by a mere shade.” The 
Evangelist only differed from the Docetists in af- 
firming the corporeality of Jesus. “ The word was 
made flesh and dwelt among us.” But the flesh was 
nothing but a mere receptacle of the Eternal Word. 
The Gospel is not a biography, but an Epic celebrat- 
ing the manifestation of the Logos, his conflict with 
the powers of darkness, his seeming downfall turn 
ing to glorious victory. We have here no develop- 
ment of a character and purpose as in the Synop- 
tics. 

The redundant and yet resounding sentences of 
the Proem of the Gospel set forth the splendid the- 
sis that the writer will maintain against all comers. 
Then we have the testimony of the Baptist to the 
truth of this thesis, so different from the Synoptic 
version of the natural relations of Jesus and John, 
because the subordination and baptism of the in- 
carnate Word would be a manifest absurdity ;* then 
the miracle of Cana in which he “ manifested forth 
his glory; ” then in Nicodemus atypical representa- 
tive of Jewish unbelief, to whom belief in the in- 
carnate Logos is declared to be the only method of 
salvation. Following this immediately and natur- 
ally we have the manifestation of his glory to the 
Samaritans, then to the out-and-out Gentiles sym- 
bolized by the nobleman whose son. he heals. In 
the fifth chapter an argumentative and miraculous 
attestation of the Word as a life-giving power; in 

* The important function of the Baptist in this Gospel ha* natur- 
ally suggested to some critics that it was specially intended for a cir- 
cle in which the Baptist’s name and fame were specially regarded. 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


299 


the sixth chapter the feeding of the five thousand 
introduces a representation of the Word as the 
heavenly manna which nourishes the spiritual lif? 
The seventh chapter reveals the efficacy of the 
Word against the darkness embodied in the eccle- 
siastical system of the Jews; the eighth, so far 
as it is really human, — its account of the woman 
taken in adultery, — was no part of the original gospel. 
In the ninth chapter, the healing of a blind man re- 
veals the Logos as the principle of Light, and leads 
in the next chapter to a glorification of the Logos 
as the Light of the World. “ In him was life,” says 
the Proem, and this is the special doctrine of the 
tenth chapter, illustrated by the raising of Lazarus. 
Next, in the eleventh chapter, we have the last sup- 
per, which is not the passover of the Synoptics. 
According to John, Jesus did not eat of, but was, the 
Paschal Lamb. Then after the betrayal and denial 
by Judas and Peter, we have through a series of 
chapters a continuous discourse, the ground theme 
of which, perpetually recurring, is the glorification 
of the Son by the Father. Let not the tenderness 
of this discourse, which has made the gospel it con- 
tains the gospel of the sentimentalists in every age, 
prevent our seeing its essential narrowness. “ I 
pray not for the world ” has not a pleasant sound, 
and when a little further on we read, “ Neither pray 
I for these alone,” the widening circle still includes 
those only who believe in Jesus as the Logos, upon 
the testimony of his disciples. The concluding 
chapters, treating of the death of Jesus and his 


300 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DA V. 


resurrection, are all subservient to the leading pur- 
pose of the book.* 

Such is the general arrangement of the Evangel- 
ist’s material. How plain it is that we have here no 
simple biography of Jesus written by John or an)' 
other “disciple whom Jesus loved,” but a dogmatic 
exposition of a theological conception of surpassing 
energy and daring. In a previous lecture I have 
discussed the authorship of the Apocalypse, and de- 
cided in favor of the Johannine authorship. But if 
John wrote the Apocalypse, he certainly did not 
write fthe Fourth Gospel. Longfellow asks, — 

“ Can it be that from the lips 
Of this same gentle Evangelist 
Came the dread Apocalypse ? ” 

Morally, Yes; for there is nothing in the sentiment- 
al mysticism of the Evangelist inconsistent with the 
sternness and fierceness of the Apocalyptist. But 
psychologically, No; not even supposing the Apoca- 
lypse to have been written by John, in 69, A. D., and 
the Gospel when he was more than ninety years of 
age. In this sense at least, good Nicodemus, a man 
cannot “be born again when he is old.” No feeble 
centenarian wrote this gospel teeming with youth 
and fire. No Galilean fisherman ever got so deep as 

*The Gospel naturally terminates with the twentieth chapter. 
The twenty-first is an appendix, but is it from another hand ? The 
critics are divided. Hilgenfeld’s opinion, very recent, is that it is 
the Evangelist’s own afterthought. It is in perfect keeping with his 
nervous dread that his account will be rejected. “ Thus conscience 
doth make cowards of us all.” 

f If he did not write the Apocalypse, the case is little altered. 




THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


301 


this in Platonism, Philonism, Gnosticism. The 
artifices by which the apologists endeavor to main- 
tain the authorship of John substantially abandon it. 
Renan may well be right in his opinion that we have 
here some genuine traditions and events. Matthew 
Arnold may even less doubtfully contend that we 
have here some genuine sayings of Jesus. But his 
method of detecting them, if you will pardon the 
comparison, is like a patent knife-sharpener. Let 
the inventor show it off and it works beautifully. 
Buy it and take it home, and it sharpens nothing but 
your temper. Let Mr. Arnold work his own me- 
thod, and he can find quite a number of sentences 
in the Fourth Gospel that have the ring of natural- 
ness and Jesus-like simplicity. But no ordinary man 
can work his method.* 

The external evidence for the Johannine author- 
ship of the Fourth Gospel is by no means reassur- 
ing. It is attributed to John for the first time by 
Theophilus of Antioch about 180 A. D., and simul- 
taneously by the canon of Muratori. Nor is there 
any satisfactory evidence of its existence at a much 
earlier date. That Justin Martyr could have known 
it and accepted it in 150, A. D. without quoting it, 
when it was exactly what he wanted to confirm his 
own personal doctrine of the Word, is absolutely in- 

* In a public lecture, Dr. R. S. Storrs has recently declared that 
the Fourth Gospel is the most consummate literary product which the 
ages have engendered. Mr. Arnold also knows something about 
literature, and it is his opinion that the literary merits of the Fourth 
Gospel are almost inappreciable ; that the author has strung together 
his materials in a most inartistic, clumsy and bewildering fashion. 
Who shall decide when doctors disagree ? 


302 


THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY 


credible. There is a yet more convincing argument 
for its non-recognition as John’s Gospel, even beyond 
the middle of the second century. For hereabouts 
there was a famous quarrel in the church, known as 
the Paschal controversy ; some contending that 
Jesus ate the Passover on the 14th Nisan, others 
that the last supper was on the 13th. John was 
appealed to by Polycarp as having accepted the 14th 
as the proper day, in harmony with the Synoptics, 
But the Fourth Gospel puts the last supper expressly 
on the 13th. If Polycarp accepted the gospel as 
John’s, how could he have appealed to John in flat 
defiance of the gospel? But such a gospel once 
written must have achieved distinction in a few 
years. Therefore we cannot put its date far back 
of 150, A. D. We have assigned the first Epistle of 
John to 130, A. D.; the Gospel must have appeared a 
little later. Dr. J. J. Tayler says about 140. It 
may have appeared a little earlier than this ; or, as 
Davidson believes, a few years later. 

Though he never once calls himself by name, the 
writer of the Gospel evidently means to pass himself 
for John. Can it be possible that a writer of so 
much spiritual depth and moral earnestness would 
simulate another’s personality? Again, it must be 
insisted that such simulation was the order of the 
day. Apparently it was not inconsistent with the 
profoundest spiritual depth or moral earnestness. 
Witness the pseudo Daniel and the Wisdom of 
Solomon ; witness also second Thessalonians and all 
the pastoral epistles. At least the offence was not 
so great as if the writer had attached his own name 


THE FOUR GOSPELS. 


303 


to a great writing that was not his. His was an act 
of wonderful self-abnegation. He “made himself 
of no reputation ” for the sake of his idea. It would 
not have served his purpose if he had acknowledged 
himself to be its author. With sufficient certainty 
we can identify him as the author of the three 
Catholic Epistles commonly ascribed to John, who 
in the second and third calls himself the presbyter 
or elder. Was he the celebrated Presbyter John of 
Ephesus? If so the oneness of his name with the 
Apostle’s may have facilitated the apostolic reputa- 
tion of the work. 

What shall we say of his accomplished task ? It 
has done wonders for the Apostle’s reputation, and 
it abounds in sentences which have gradually taken 
on even more spiritual meanings than they at first 
embodied, but it has contributed in a large degree 
to confuse the image of Jesus. If we would know 
what manner of man he was, we must appeal from 
this great Epic of the Logos to the more natural 
and human representations of the Synoptic gospels. 
Here, also, much is indistinct, but what we encounter 
is a human being, not a theological abstraction. 

And now at length I bring these lectures to a 
close. Some that set out with me have fainted by 
the way. Others have kept me company from first 
to last. To such I trust I have not been a false 
though doubtless I have been a tedious guide. I 
dare not hope that everything which I have written 
will stand the test of the more rational and scientific 
criticism -which is yet to be. But I am entirely sure 
that all along I have been moving in the right direc- 


304 


THE BIBLE OF TQ-DA Y. 


tion ; and, if away from average conceptions of the 
Bible, towards such as are a thousand times more 
reasonable and suggestive and inspiring than those 
which they are silently but surely modifying and 
displacing in the minds of all intelligent and earnest 
people. 

“ Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 

And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone ; 

Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it, 

Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan ; 

While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud. 

While thunder’s surges burst on cliffs of cloud, 

Still at the prophet’s feet the nations sit.” 


THE END. 



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